People familiar with Kevin Smith's View Askew movies won't really need a review for Dogma, as they can safely predict what they'll get here — a darkly humorous and potty-glorifying off-kilter look at the world from the perspective of ordinary working-class New Jersey stoners and their circle of associates.
What Dogma brings to the table that distinguishes it from the other View Askewniverse movies is its religious theme; this movie makes it very clear up front that it's going to take a long, unblinking look at religion in general, Christianity in particular, and Catholicism especially. That, unsurprisingly, caused the movie to draw the ire of Moral Guardians who (in the fine tradition of religious films everywhere) condemned it without actually watching the movie or knowing any details.
Needless to say, such reactions are overblown; Dogma is less of a criticism (or even analysis) of religion as much as it's a buddyroad trip comedy with a religious purpose, and the only reason it wasn't called Jay and Silent Bob Go To Church is because it wasn't as marketable. Sure, the end of the world (and the rest of creation) is at stake, but the movie never really gets bogged down with the weight of the responsibilities; when the Forces of Hell are defeated with a can of Febreeze and two stoners with attitude, the viewer knows this endeavor is as serious as Jay's entrepreneurial dreams.
As a comedy, Dogma is a crass and irreverent bit of entertainment, a case of Kevin Smith gathering his friends together to have some fun making a movie. As a religious tract, it's a breezy grab-bag of random observations that vaguely urges people to be excellent to each other. Whether or not it's worth watching should depend more on your tolerance for Toilet Humor and lowbrow comedy than your religious beliefs.
Kevin Smith's askew view of Catholicism
People familiar with Kevin Smith's View Askew movies won't really need a review for Dogma, as they can safely predict what they'll get here — a darkly humorous and potty-glorifying off-kilter look at the world from the perspective of ordinary working-class New Jersey stoners and their circle of associates.
What Dogma brings to the table that distinguishes it from the other View Askewniverse movies is its religious theme; this movie makes it very clear up front that it's going to take a long, unblinking look at religion in general, Christianity in particular, and Catholicism especially. That, unsurprisingly, caused the movie to draw the ire of Moral Guardians who (in the fine tradition of religious films everywhere) condemned it without actually watching the movie or knowing any details.
Needless to say, such reactions are overblown; Dogma is less of a criticism (or even analysis) of religion as much as it's a buddy road trip comedy with a religious purpose, and the only reason it wasn't called Jay and Silent Bob Go To Church is because it wasn't as marketable. Sure, the end of the world (and the rest of creation) is at stake, but the movie never really gets bogged down with the weight of the responsibilities; when the Forces of Hell are defeated with a can of Febreeze and two stoners with attitude, the viewer knows this endeavor is as serious as Jay's entrepreneurial dreams.
Besides providing some cheap laughs, however, Dogma's secondary objective is to give Kevin Smith a platform to pontificate on assorted religious topics. Mind, this is not necessarily a bad thing; aside from some rather lighthearted tongue-in-cheek jokes about God being a woman or Jesus was actually black, most of it is fairly non-controversial stuff about the dangers of zealotry or the joys of tolerance. Smith saves his harshest dings against Catholicism, but even then he approaches it with mild disappointment rather than any sort of full-blown anti-religious wraith. The end result is that Dogma doesn't really have much of a religious message at all; the movie simply strings together a collection of jokes, observations, and random thoughts about religion, but no one will mistake this movie for Martin Luther's 95 Theses.
As a comedy, Dogma is a crass and irreverent bit of entertainment, a case of Kevin Smith gathering his friends together to have some fun making a movie. As a religious tract, it's a breezy grab-bag of random observations that vaguely urges people to be excellent to each other. Whether or not it's worth watching should depend more on your tolerance for Toilet Humor and lowbrow comedy than your religious beliefs.