By Edward Champion

The Catholic League's recent condemnation of Dogma really made me curious about Kevin Smith's latest opus. Smith himself is a devout Catholic. And for all his benign potty-mouthed humor, a love for his fellow neighbors in New Jersey, whether slackers or other heroes caught in a pickle, is just prevalent enough in some of his movies to transform them from agreeable lowbrow entertainment into moving parables.

But Dogma is a far cry from the emotional heights of Chasing Amy or the down-and-dirty perspective of overworked convenience store clerks in Clerks. It is a movie that fails because Smith seems to prefer standing on his own dogmatic soapbox rather than co-existing in the underground trenches that his characters inhabit.

Here, Smith has taken on more than he can chew. Dogma is an aloof (though not entirely uninteresting) attempt to cross John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress with National Lampoon's Animal House. It is also extraordinarily didactic. Unlike one of its obvious models, Monty Python's Life of Brian, Smith seems to be innocuously pushing religious virtues (as opposed to commenting on them) upon his audience, assuming that the entire Catholic world can be applied piecemeal into every aspect of society. Not one atheist appears. Religion, pro or con, is seen everywhere, whether through Catholics picketing abortion clinics or the dubious Satan-spawned instrument of a shit monster.

Which, in my estimation, seems to be something the Catholic League should be proud of, irreverent or no.

The film opens promisingly with a Monty Python and the Holy Grail-style disclaimer for Smith's self-described "trifle of a film," that both extols and ridicules the Platypus (Smith's capitalization, not mine), insisting that "passing judgment is reserved for God and God alone (this goes for you film critics too…just kidding)." Well, thanks for thinking of us, Kevin.

We then see a bunch of teenage hockey players beat the hell out of an old man at a New Jersey beach. These are later revealed to be minions of a demon by the name of Azrael (played by Smith regular Jason Lee), who managed to escape hell. His purposes for doing so are revealed later.

George Carlin is then unveiled as Cardinal Glick, unveiling a new movement called "Catholicism Wow" and featuring a smiling and winking "Buddy Christ" as its new symbol. Glick, like Azrael, also figures into the story later.

Meanwhile, doomed to a long stay in Wisconsin, Loki and Bartleby (played respectively by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) are two fallen angels who pass the time by playing Kaufmanesque pranks. However, due to a loophole in doctrine, they may get their shot at reentering heaven if they step through the gates of Glick's church at a specified moment. However, such an entry will mean the end of existence.

Now God can't be located. (She apparently likes to play skee-ball.) So an abortion clinic worker by the name of Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), herself a questioning Catholic, is recruited by the Voice of God (Alan Rickman) on a crusade to stop Loki and Bartleby from entering the church with the help of the 13th disciple (Chris Rock), the muse Serendipity (Salma Hayek), and, of course, the stock Smith characters, Jay and Silent Bob (Chris Mewes and Smith himself).

Sounds promising? Well, not exactly.

Instead of the gleeful notion of Smith providing brutal assaults on faith and doctrine, the humor that drives Dogma is a sad collection of simplistic clunkers. Instead of Smith's appealing and seemingly innocent form of humor as introspection, we get endless homages to other movies, most of which are unfunny. There's a lengthy scene in which Jay goes on about Silent Bob's love for John Hughes movies. Jay tells us that Silent Bob apparently breaks down into tears every time he sees Pretty in Pink. (Yeah. So?) After a fight scene in a train, Silent Bob speaks, saying "No ticket." -- an homage to the Indiana Jones movies. There's even one stupid throwback late in the film to The Incredible Hulk television series.

Now humor can come about from pop culture references. But merely repeating lines from other movies amounts to sad desperation. Compare the feeble repetition of movie dialogue in Dogma to the hilarious opening scene in Chasing Amy in which a race-driven interpretation of the Star Wars trilogy transforms into a polemical argument and you will see the difference between a deficient screenwriter padding out a two hour and fifteen minute movie with material and a witty scribe commenting on the silly passions American twentysomethings get caught up in after being weaned on a childhood of pop culture.

Smith has in the past demonstrated a knack for writing sharp dialogue and, when he pursues it, the creation of seemingly effortless characters possessed of dimension. But every time he tries to take on a cultural issue (mall culture in Mallrats and religious faith here), he loses grasp of his own characters, allowing vital development to deviate into lame one-liners. He is, like most comedy writers, a shrewd observer. But Smith seems to have his heart on executing a misplaced Star Wars-like melodramatic odyssey and, when it comes down to preaching philosophy, his endless soliloquies feel as if they've been composed by a hopeless enrollee in a community college creative writing course.

Linda Fiorentino as the questioning crusader called on to carry out God's quest is miscast. The idea here is to presumably make Bethany a Joan of Arc with an attitude. The problem is that Fiorentino has too much attitude. (After The Last Seduction, it appears that her acting strengths seem to gravitate in that direction.)

The presence of Jay and Silent Bob throughout most of the film is also burdensome to Smith's comedic toggle switch. Much as these two characters allowed Mallrats to dwindle into a disappointing waste of time by simply existing for a long duration, their constant efforts here to lay Bethany grow tedious and superficial. The duo are best used scarcely, as they were in Clerks and Chasing Amy, with the seemingly go-nowhere slacker Silent Bob offering an unexpected morsel of empirical wisdom to a character in need.

And the promised novelty of Alanis Morissette as God at the end of the film is far from eventful. In light of her pop star persona, Smith could have had a lot of fun with her playing a vengeful god with a heart of gold. But Morissette merely smiles and skips about. And, after ninety minutes of lame jokes and aimless proselytizing. it comes off as a colossal disappointment.

To use a Smith-like observation, it appears that the Star Trek movie law (every other movie is good) can also be applied to Smith's movies. The interesting thing about Smith is that it doesn't have to be this way. If he wants to walk the earth, he needs to concentrate more on the people themselves than the newspaper headlines, pop culture and lofty ideals that govern them.

If he did, he'd be a remarkably reliable filmmaker.