The Ten (**)

The idea for this is good. Take the biblical Ten Commandments, get a bunch of folks like Winona Ryder, Liev Shreiber, Gretchen Mol, and Jessica Alba to act out featurettes based on each one, and put them all together in some kind of clever satire. Something like Woody Allen’s early Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) is what I might have imagined. Anyway, Paul Rudd plays a writer who introduces the segments while he also acts out a series of playlets with Famke Janssen, who plays his estranged wife. By talking to the audience, Rudd reminds us that we are watching a movie; this makes the lame segments where he interacts with Janssen seem even more artificial and stupid. Not to mention unfunny. Despite the narrator, the unifying theme, and the fact that some characters appear in two segments, I had the idea that co-writers David Wain (the director) and Ken Marino, veterans of MTV sketch comedy show The State, had a bunch of ideas that they tried to shoehorn into a concept. Religion as such barely figures in the movie, except in the last segment, where a husband plays hooky from church just so he can lounge around naked.

In a few of the skits, the commandment in question barely figures. There is a theft in the segment where Winona Ryder falls for a wooden ventriloquist’s dummy, but that would hardly seem to be the focal point. The skit would have made just as much sense, i.e. not much sense at all, without having her steal. So if the commandments themselves aren’t the source of satire, what is? If anything, TV and movie clichés. In a romance parody that’s crude (like much of the movie) but comical, an inmate (Rob Corddry) lusts after another prisoner’s “wife.” The best segment, though, is one in which a lonely librarian (Mol) heads to Mexico for a smoldering affair with a rough-hewn local. The voiceover narration, in Spanish with subtitles, made me think of a very bad knockoff of something I couldn’t quite place. Even this segment doesn’t have a real ending, which is true of virtually all of them. They just peter out, and the characters are too underwritten or unrealistic to actually care about. Most of the ten parts are merely absurdist takes on familiar plots, not that far removed from the Scary Movie sort of humor, but without aping anything in particular. In the first segment, a man falls from a plane without a parachute, gets stuck in the ground, and becomes a celebrity. Perhaps there would have been a way to make that silly premise funny, but I didn’t see it here. So, my recommendation is, watch for this to appear on TV, watch segment two, and forget the rest.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/10/07