Dogma is a religious parable spiked with Smith's by-now trademark chattiness and some loopy, inspired ensemble casting. Everybody's favorite poster boys for male-bonding, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are Loki and Bartleby, two fallen angels exiled to Wisconsin ("worse than hell") who think they can make it back to the big house in the sky due to a loophole in church dogma. The problem is that their re-entry will cause the disintegration of human existence. The only person who can stop them is Bethany (film-noir babe Linda Fiorentino), a Catholic woman undergoing a crisis of faith. Along the way we meet Rufus (Chris Rock), the jive-talking 13th Apostle ("A black man can steal your stereo, but he can't be your savior," Rufus says of humans who refuse to believe that Jesus was black), and Alanis Morissette as a (thankfully) silent God.

Like Clerks and Chasing Amy, Dogma demonstrates Smith's penchant for mixing frat-house humor with casual profundity. A scene where a "shit demon" rises from a bar toilet to attack our heroes and an angel (played by Salma Hayek) takes the time to explain the biblical justification for such a creature serves as a microcosm of Dogma's odd blend of theology and scatology.

Clerks and Chasing Amy are films that I love. Dogma is a film I merely admire. This difference has a lot to do with the fact that sexuality (Chasing Amy) and service industry anomie (Clerks) are more meaningful subjects to me than the theological concerns of Dogma. For you, of course, that may not be the case, and your reaction to Dogma may vary accordingly.

But there are also formal reasons why Dogma isn't quite as successful as Clerks and Chasing Amy. Dogma is not as compact as those two films, and however talented a writer Smith may be, his visual skills haven't developed to the point where he can handle material with as epic a feel as Dogma. Structure-wise, Dogma more closely resembles Mallrats, the genial disaster that Smith made in between Clerks and Chasing Amy.