That's the basic plot of Dogma, the new film from Kevin Smith, writer/director of Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy. Smith has renamed the characters, of course: Superman is now called "God," the supervillains are fallen angels, and Batman is a distant relative of Jesus who has to defeat the angels using her wits. But anyone who's ever read a DC Universe series like Zero Hour will recognize where Smith got his ideas. Dogma is a graphic novel with a Notre Dame book cover.

Some readers may be under the impression that the movie is a religious satire. It does make a feint in that direction during the first scenes, which feature George Carlin as a cardinal announcing a new Catholic program to make the Church more accessible. There's even a jokey disclaimer before the opening credits apologizing for any inadvertent blasphemy. But the Christian trappings are only loosely draped over what's meant to be an action movie.

The fallen angels--Ben Affleck as Bartleby and Matt Damon as Loki--have been stuck in Wisconsin ever since Loki, who used to be the Angel of Death, refused to follow God's command to wipe out some sinners. Now they've figured out a way to get back into heaven. The Church has declared a plenary indulgence (a get-out-of-Purgatory-free card) to everyone who passes under the arch of a New Jersey church on a certain Sunday. All the angels have to do is transubstantiate (which here means "become human"), go through those doors, and through Jesus' gift of the keys of the kingdom to Peter, they can't be refused entrance to Paradise.

The catch? Since God banished them for eternity, their return to heaven makes God a liar. And that's the kind of paradox that makes superintelligent computers spew smoke and shut themselves down in Star Trek. Here the consequence will be the instantaneous destruction of the universe. So God chooses Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), a Catholic in the middle of a crisis of faith, to go to New Jersey and stop the angels. Along the way, she picks up two prophets, the ubiquitous Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith himself); the forgotten apostle Rufus (Chris Rock); and the former muse Serendipity (Salma Hayek). Periodically they battle the minions of Azrael (Jason Lee), a demon who sees a ticket out of hell in the situation.

If that sounds like a lot of backstory for one movie, it is. Smith has the entire cultural heritage of Western Christianity to draw upon, but he chooses to manufacture a whole new branch of mythology instead. This means that two-thirds of Dogma's dialogue is rapid-fire explanation of who the characters are, what's going on, why God can't stop it, and why we should care. Because Smith can't write dialogue, moreover, each of the lines he gives these fine actors to say has three or four dependent clauses, parentheticals, and awkward literary exclamations. The viewer gives up trying to process this supposedly vital information around the time that Salma Hayek, for whom English is a second language, starts spouting it as fast as her accent will let her.

Smith, famous for being a comic book fan, got a chance to write for the Daredevil series recently, and I picked up a few hoping that he'd found his medium. Unfortunately, his comic book writing displayed the same logorrhea that characterizes his movies. It might be thought, however, that some time spent with Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti, fine comics artists, would have taught Smith a few things about shooting action scenes; after all, a comic-book action sequence is basically a movie storyboard. But the paltry action scenes Smith manages to squeeze into Dogma are among the flattest and most poorly planned you'll ever see in a major motion picture.

What's going to get most of the attention in Smith's film is the theological tweaks that are the ostensible theme: Jesus is revealed to be black, God's a sometimes-female skeeball fanatic, etc. This stuff was tame enough to be sitcom fodder back in the '70s. Only Ben Affleck, who proves once again that he can light up a screen in a supporting role, gets a little deeper: His Bartleby reflects on the pain that comes with being rejected by the one you love. But in this same scene, he and Bethany manage to come to the world-shattering conclusion that people are bored by church. Stop the presses! Even the best parodies Smith comes up with--the glimpses of the "Catholicism Wow!" campaign, which includes a "buddy Jesus" to replace the crucifix--have already been outstripped by the reality of evangelical ad campaigns like the "got Jesus?" TV spots and "God's Gym" T-shirts.

Dogma has something in common with another film that opened last weekend: Luc Besson's The Messenger (see below). Both take as part of their setting the theological problem of how God acts in history: Why are we constantly confronted with human beings who claim a calling from the Almighty? Why can't God intervene directly instead of choosing surrogates? Neither film comes up with a satisfactory answer, but at least Besson addresses the question directly. Smith's answer is straight out of the climactic finale to a Justice League of America miniseries: God (or Superman) is missing in action (or chained next to some Kryptonite), and as soon as he's back, all will be well again.