Three Stars for The Ten

Three Stars for The Ten

By Bill Wine

Review of The Ten . Directed by David Wain. Written by David Wain and Ken Marino.

The first commandment of comedy--"Thou shalt not take thyself too seriously"--sets the tone for The Ten , and provides a generous number of hearty laughs for anyone who subscribes to it.

The Ten is a comedic anthology film: 10 stories, each inspired--some more directly and effectively than others--by one of the Ten Commandments, the religious and moral imperatives that, followed faithfully or not, figure so prominently in both Judaism and Christianity.

If you think that one shouldn't joke about such matters, then this is not a movie for you.

If modern twists on age-old religious maxims are inherently in bad taste in your eyes, then stay away.

If, on the other hand, these cows are not so sacred, prepare to be highly amused--and sometimes convulsed with laughter.

The 10 sketches are pretty much presented serially, but they're also connected and interwoven throughout the film.

The style is a form of cinematic stream-of-consciousness--stories starting and stopping and interrupting each other, with early references paying off much later in unexpected ways, motifs surfacing in segments where you least expect them, and characters appearing in different scenarios.

Anyone expecting a serious consideration of what was engraved on those tablets that Moses brought down the mountain all those years ago should be advised that that's just not the gig.

The Ten is a clever, inventive, anything-goes entertainment--not for nothing is it rated R--with vignettes that are creatively outrageous and iconoclastic, and more than willing to be, if not sacrilegious, then certainly offensive and playfully blasphemous.

And it's laugh-out-loud funny much of the time.

Paul Rudd--who improves every movie he's in with his reliable presence alone, let alone his assured comic timing--is the host of this omnibus of sketches, introducing each segment as being about one of the commandments, while also interacting with some of the women in his life, including first wife Gretchen (Famke Janssen) and and girlfriend Liz (Jessica Alba)--and Rudd returns later in the "Thou shalt not commit adultery" sketch.

"Thou shalt have no other god before me" and "Honor thy mother and father" proceed in directions you don't expect, as does "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," which finds Rob Corddry as an inmate in an all-male prison.

You do the math.

"Thou shalt not steal" features Winona Ryder as a newlywed who falls in love with a ventriloquist's dummy. Ms. Ryder proceeds to demonstrate an impressive flair for comedy that she's never revealed before and, in the process, breaks another commandment, "Thou shalt not steal the movie."

Adam Brody is Stephen Montgomery in The Ten , a new comedy about the Ten Commandments. Photo courtesy THINKFilm.

But in perhaps the film's boldest conceit, "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain," Gretchen Mol plays a virginal librarian who has a fling in Mexico with a carpenter named Jesus (Justin Theroux). Yes, that Jesus.

And eventually we even get an animated sequence and a musical one.

The writers miss few comic tricks along the way.

Director and co-writer David Wain (he and co-scenarist, Ken Marino, are both also actors and members of the comedy group The State) establish and maintain continuity by moving characters from one story to another.

As with most composite or amalgam films, The Ten has a hit-and-miss quality, with scattershot laughs dominating some segments more than others. But there are a lot more hits than misses and no segments that flat-out bomb.

All things considered, the quality from sketch to sketch doesn't vary nearly as much as you might think.

There are screwball comedy bits, flights of fancy, Monty Pythonesque zaniness, broad gags, dry in-jokes, coal-black humor, and spurts of surrealism. And the genres being parodied are aptly captured and stylistically sent up, making the jokes all the funnier.

Woody Allen is referenced more than once, and that's perhaps no accident, because the film often recalls the anything-for-a-laugh anarchy of his early work in films such as Take the Money and Run and Bananas .

Detractors will find The Ten an offensive mishmash, proponents a refreshingly liberating yockfest.

Ultimately, the film takes the wisdom of the Ten Commandments as a given, despite its unwaveringly irreverent approach to the material

The Ten is a grab-bag novelty item--a celebration of silliness that is refreshingly different, especially at summer's end--with a strong sense of the ridiculous, and a cast game enough to go with the flow of comedic absurdity.

And it's a film that interfaith couples could enjoy together.

Our commandment: Thou shalt see it and have a good time.