As Kevin Smith’s manic comedy “Dogma” opens–in present-day New Jersey–the angels are scheming to sneak back in. If Loki and Bartleby make it, God will be proved fallible, and all existence will be obliterated. So a team of angelic superheroes bands together to stop them. There’s a grumpy messenger (Alan Rickman), a muse who’s now working as a stripper (Salma Hayek), an apostle named Rufus (Chris Rock) who claims he was left out of the Bible because he is black and an abortion-clinic worker (Linda Fiorentino) who’s been chosen as the human who must save humanity. What follows is a movie about heaven that makes no earthly sense. To further complicate things, our superheroes are being followed by a satanic street-hockey team.
Director Smith (“Clerks,” “Chasing Amy”) attempts something ambitious with “Dogma”–an antic mix of the sacred and the very profane, of organized-religion bashing and sex jokes. And the movie is gutsy, too, at least in the sense that it will infuriate some devout Roman Catholics. (The movie was controversial before anyone even saw it. So the powers that be at Miramax, which is owned by Disney, decided to release it through another company, Lions Gate Films.) The real trouble here, however, isn’t sacrilege: Smith clearly believes in God and fears hell and so on. The real problem is that “Dogma” isn’t as funny as it thinks it is. The speechifying about religion is dull to a surreal degree–anybody want to hear from the noted theologian Salma Hayek?–and ultimately makes pedestrian points. Faith is good. The rigidity of the church is bad, etc.
For some reason, though, you never stop rooting for “Dogma.” That’s partly because the actors are mostly welcome faces. Rock is, as always, a furnace-blast of acerbic energy. Damon’s Loki has some similarly edgy moments–he hates sinners so much that he wants to go on one last killing spree for old time’s sake. (Loki is brilliant and homicidal–he’s Will Hunting on speed.) And George Carlin turns up as a New Jersey cardinal who practices putting into a golden chalice and tries to rejuvenate his religion with an inane PR campaign called “Catholicism–Wow!” One of the cardinal’s brainstorms is junking the old crucifix, which he regards as too dreary: “Christ didn’t come down to Earth to give us the willies!”
Another reason you root for “Dogma” is that–as preposterous as the movie gets–it’s clearly reveling in its own hokiness. The ending is a cheesy, operatic showdown between good and evil outside a cathedral. God herself (Alanis Morissette) makes a beguiling appearance. She never utters a word–but then “Dogma” would leave anybody speechless.
