Weirdo angels

Dogma (18) Selected cinemas

You've got to hand it to Kevin Smith; he has potentially great ideas. Since wowing the American indie world with his very funny, extra-low budget slacker comedy Clerks, the New Jersey-born writer/director has brought his particular brand of geek-boy humour and comic-strip sensibility to bear on such vexed questions of our time as mall culture and bisexuality.

Unfortunately, both his second film, Mall Rats and his third, Chasing Amy, were let down by sloppy scripts and self-indulgent acting. His latest, Dogma, is certainly not short of ambition, but the same problems are apparent; Smith's ideas may be impressive, but one begins to wonder whether he's actually any good at making films.

Dogma certainly isn't your average, run-of-the-mill comedy - it has already raised hackles in the States, where its blend of codtheology and scatological humour was always going to ruffle the feathers of Christian conservatives. No matter that Smith has declared himself to be a practising Roman Catholic - a comedy where the heroine (Linda Fiorentino) works in an abortion clinic, and is chosen to save the world by God, played by whingerocker Alanis Morissette, is hardly going to find favour with the sort of American Catholics who so enthusiastically picketed the inoffensive Priest a couple of years back.

Like Priest, Dogma was initially due to be released in the US by Disney subsidiary Miramax, but pressure on the parent company forced them to pass it on to another distributor; the Miramax influence is still visible in a half-hearted but rather amusing disclaimer at the start of the movie. The controversy and publicity hasn't done the film any harm - quite the contrary, in fact. Together with the audience-pulling power of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, it has already made Dogma Smith's most successful movie to date.

Damon and Affleck play fallen angels Bartleby and Loki, banished to Wisconsin for the past few millennia, who espy a chance to sneak back into heaven through a gateway inadvertently opened by plenary indulgences granted to mark the centenary of a New Jersey church. Fiorentino is visited by languidly cynical seraph, Metatron (Alan Rickman, the best thing here), who charges her with stopping them. Along the way, she meets up with the jive-talking Thirteenth Apostle (Chris Rock), a strip-teasing Muse (Salma Hayek), and Smith's regulars, Jay and Silent Bob, and fights off such impediments as the "Shit Monster".

This is all rendered in a style best characterised as High Juvenile, with no opportunity for obvious jokes left unexplored. No harm in that, necessarily - if the jokes are funny enough. Sadly, they're not, and there's far too much dull exposition to allow the movie to develop any energy. Smith clearly believes that he can write good dialogue, but his script here is several drafts short of a winner, and it's hard to avoid the impression that the actors are directing themselves. Compared to, say, the inspired vulgarity of the Farrelly Brothers' films, this is a tediously windy exercise, too pleased with itself by half.

Mystery Men (PG) General release

More broad scatological humour with comic strip inclinations can be found in this spoof fantasy actioner, based on the Dark Horse comic, in which a band of hapless, wannabe superheroes are faced with the task of saving their city from destruction at the hands of dastardly supervillain Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush). The central premise - that anyone can be a superhero - offers fertile ground for some good gags about the nature of fame and failure, but from the first five, shrieking, hysterical minutes we're clearly in trouble.

Put simply, Mystery Men is a messy shambles of a movie, which does no justice to a talented cast that includes the likes of William H. Macy (The Shovel Man), Hank Azaria (The Blue Raja), Ben Stiller (Mr Furious) and Janeane Garofalo (The Bowler).

When the city's regular hero, Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear) is captured by Rush, these misfits finally get the chance to prove that they can live up to their billing. But this rambling, wayward and deeply silly movie has lost us before we ever get a chance to care. A shame, really, because occasionally the over-the-top design and zany humour gel, and there's a glimpse of what might have been.

Blue Streak (15) General release

It's hard to believe that someone actually had the gall to claim an "original screenplay" credit for Blue Streak, a shamelessly derivative, painfully uninspired comedy thriller which rolls out every cliche from the cobwebbed template established by Eddie Murphy in the 1980s in such brain-candy as Beverly Hills Cop. Here, Martin Lawrence is the black guy set to work in a new police station - he's actually a jewel thief and he's trying to get back the loot he stashed there years before. With painful predictability, he teaches the gormless cops the rules of the street, how to act cool, and how to really catch the bad guys.

Journeyman director Les Mayfield (his last outing was the dim but profitable Flubber) goes through the motions of replicating the same, dumb set-pieces we've seen in so many other Los Angeles-set police comedies, while Lawrence's irritating love affair with himself continues - someone should tell him he's not as funny as he thinks.

The only redeeming feature is Luke Wilson's likeable performance as Lawrence's gormless sidekick - but that's certainly not enough to warrant wasting your time and money on this tiresome, dog-eared piece of cynical product.

Harry Browne adds:

Muppets from Space (Gen)

"His breakfast cereal told him to sit on the roof and watch the sky."

"Boy, talk about whole grain and nuts."

Ah, yes, the Muppets, purveyors of puns to all the finest 1970s homes, are back on the big screen - and children everywhere cry out: "The Whatsits?"

I'm afraid the seven- and four-year-olds of my close acquaintance wouldn't know the Muppets from Seamus Brennan. Their Dad had to bite his tongue on the way home from the screening as they discussed "Mrs Piggy" and "that frog".

In fairness, many other kids will be familiar with these Muppet Show characters - as distinct from the Sesame Street gang - from videos of their earlier movies. Nonetheless, the Muppet-makers have taken no chances and filled Muppets from Space with parent-pleasing nostalgia: the UFOlogy references are reasonably up-to-date, but the music is mostly black pop of 20-odd years ago, starting with Brick House; when the Muppet aliens finally, climactically, arrive from outer space, the aesthetic is pure glam-funk, quite specifically reminiscent of Parliament's Mothership Connection. (And what do you know: there's George Clinton himself joining "Pepe the Prawn" to sing Flash-light over the closing credits.)

Even the funkiest children will need more than that to keep them entertained, and Muppets from Space delivers the necessary wit and inventiveness only intermittently. Miss Piggy is the karate-chopping ballbreaker of old, Animal is an unlikely heartbreaker, and Gonzo makes a touching hero in search of his extraterrestrial origins (Tarzan-like, he decides his true identity is in his adopted home).

But their X-filing adventures are only funny in places, and thrilling rather less often than that. Jeffrey Tambor is the most prominent human contributor as the crazed military-industrial complex villain, but as good an actor as he is, he falls through the thin material. Ray Liotta, briefly, is the best of the rest.

All the same, I do like that frog.