Commandments

When someone takes such a good idea... a man who decides to break the ten commandments in order to spite god... and creates a movie out of it, I tend to sit up and pay attention. I won't lie, part of me watching this was in order to enjoy watching someone mocking religion(me being a lifelong Atheist), at least at first(when I watched this at age... what, eleven? when it first came out), but I started to see it as a somewhat good satire. However, that's all it is... somewhat good satire. There is some good questions in this film... dealing with faith and religion. However, the film spends too much time on... nothing. Plenty of time passes without anything important happening. And in the end, it's just too cookie-cut and happy to mean anything. It should have kept with the style instead. The whole film is shot very darkly and dreary, every single scene looks at though it's night-time and is seen through the eyes of a natural born pessimist. The plot is fairly good. The pacing is decent. The acting is solid. The characters are fairly well-written, though a few of them are underdeveloped. The whole romantic part of the film(together with the ending) makes it too sweet and pretty. Too positive compared with the rest of the film. As if the writer/director was bound and gagged while someone more positive finished the film and added the romantic subplot. The dark comedy is one of the best points of the film. Very funny. The satire is quite good, as well. All in all, a fairly good film, but not one to make a quest out of getting your hands on. I recommend it to fans of the actors and of dark comedies. People with questions for religion(particularly Christianity) might also want to check it out. 5/10

One thing I can say for Courteney Cox, she really got hotter with Kurt Russel in 3000 Miles to Graceland than she did with Aidan Quinn here. Not that she wasn't hot, but Kurt got the better deal.

This was a quirky black comedy about a man who lost his reason for living and decided to damn god and break all his commandments. Well, damning god is breaking one of them. Hooking up with his sister-in-law was just one of the ten, but what kept you interested was how he was going to break the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" one.

Good support by Anthony LaPaglia as Courtney's husband, Harry. "I break 5 or 6 commandments every day before lunch." Not a good man, but, you know how that karma thing works. It all ended well.

Fine film about a man who lost his wife, and as a result begins to question the motives of God. He has all these emotional problems while his arrogant brother-in-law is doing fine while totally ignoring any religious commitments; which the brother-in-law makes his relative very aware of. However, in the end things do not remain the same for arrogant in-law. Nor for the man who lost his wife. This film may bother some Christians at first, but in the end I think this film will be accepted as giving a positive message about theology. The ending was surprising and gratifying.

The idea (a man thinks he has been targeted for suffering by God, so he decides to get his revenge by breaking the Ten Commandments one by one) is intriguing. It's so intriguing, in fact, that this was one of the very rare instances where I happened to rent a film without having heard a single thing about it beforehand, based solely on the plot synopsis on the video cover instead. Unfortunately the film turned out to be a messy talkathon. It is certainly offbeat and beautifully photographed, but it seems to lack a clear sense of direction, of where it is going and what point it is trying to make, and the characters are not sufficiently developed. The writer-director of this film poses thought-provoking, eternal theological questions ("If God is able but unwilling to prevent evil, isn't it logical to assume He is malevolent?"), but perhaps lacks the courage to follow his premise through to the end. (**)

There's good work being done here by the principals--I can't decide which of them I like the most, really, although Anthony LaPaglia's noirish everyday scumbag is the best-written of the three. While the story has its weaknesses, it works fine enough for this sort of unassuming film that tells a story in its own meandering way. Courtney Cox finally comes out of her shell, finally playing a likable character, and she proves a worthy receptacle for most of the camera's adoration. All around, a good date rental for those who won't be put off by the sacreligious plotline.