In his review sent to Father Geek, Ash, a real Smith-Geek reports some disappointment with DOGMA, but says he's prepared to live with it...
Agent Ash here reporting on a sneak preview of Dogma that took place at my university earlier tonight. After asking a couple of fine damsels to "hail to the king," the movie kicked off. Now let me just go on the record for saying that when not fighting the deadites from beyond, Agent Ash loves his Kevin Smith movies. The Mallrats DVD is the hallmark of my collection and I can quote most of Chasing Amy and Clerks. I had read this script when it first broke on the internet, and still remembering most of it, my cinematic experience was a bit different from those around me.
But lets cut to the meat and dig into the cast. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck turn in decent performances as per usual. Linda Fiorentino was decent, with no major gripes there. Chris Rock ruled as Rufus the 13th appostle. Alan Rickman was pretty good as well. Jay and Silent Bob are great in this film (Whoever had doubtscome get some!) and George Carlin was quite funny in all of his trimmed down scenes. No other major gripes for the rest of the cast including Salma Hayek (Groovy!) and Jason Lee. But Alanis as God just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. There is a snowball joke in there somewhere, but Im going there.
The movie was all in all, a decent movie experience with laughs and few dull moments. But Agent Ash does have some gripes about it, most of which come from reading the epic script of the movie that could have been.
1) The music score sucked. It did almost nothing to further enhance the movie. At points it was like they decided that they just needed music in the scene and this was the best they could do. Man, if only Danny Elfman had stayed with the film like originally thought. Oh well.
2) Alright, I thought that this movie moved fast for 130 min, but I still thought that it was choppy in points and reading the script I know that an AWESOME scene with Jay, Silent Bob and the gang leader (Hooper from Chasing Amy) was cut out yet mentioned. NOOO, this could have been awesome! Also I noticed that George Carlins scenes were quite trimmed and the plot of the guy in the hospital on life support was quite gleamed over.
3) Some of the timing of the best jokes were off (note the scene where Rufus first appeared and the reason why Silent Bob has air freshener). Also some of the ending scenes were trimmed significantly. Also what happened to the Tom Savini mastered carnage?
Basically this is a funny movie with many references to clerks and mallrats (both movies have close to everyone returning for cameos), but the movie could have been epic, but it was trimmed down to just a good adventure. Anyone who denies me the footage that was cut out on DVD will have to meet my Boom Stick!
-Agent ash
