Review of Dogma (1999) by Lasttimeisaw — 13 May 2015

A revisit of Kevin Smith’s subversive religious comedy DOGMA, “subversive” may it seems in a story where God is a woman (played by the one-and-only Alanis Morissette, whose voice can shatter anything into fragments, deservingly to be the choice chanteuse during my adolescence); there is a 13th apostle Rufus (Rock) who has been omitted in the Bible simply because of his skin colour; two fallen angles Loki (Damon) and Bartleby (Affleck) find a loophole induced by a new “Buddy Christ” propaganda from Cardinal Glick (Carlin) in New Jersey, they will get the supposed plenary indulgence and re-enter Heaven, until one of them goes berserk becomes a human-killing winged creature.

A blasphemy cannot be dodged for sure, but eventually the film appears not as subversive as the synopsis suggests, au fond, Smith simply picks various characters from religious myth and squeeze them into a wacky adventure of fantasy without even badmouthing Catholicism, there should be no hard-feeling (as the opening pointers amusingly noted).