Cast: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, George Carlin, Linda Fiorentino, Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, Jason Mewes, Alan Rickman, Jason Lee, Alanis Morrisette, Barret Hackney, Jared Pfennigwerth, Kitao Sakurai
Millenia ago, Loki (Matt Damon) was God's assassin, the angel who inundated Sodom and Gomorrah with burning sulfur and slew the firstborn of Egypt. Then his friend, Bartleby (Ben Affleck), persuaded him to quit, and the two angels were summarily banished to earth.
Now living in Milwaukee, Bartleby sees a chance to end their exile. Cardinal Ignatius Glick (George Carlin) is about to give the Roman Catholic church a new, more with-it image, starting with the centenary celebration of a church in Red Bank, New Jersey. As part of the festivities, anyone entering the church will be granted a plenary indulgence. Bartleby intends to he and Loki to be among the grantees.
Unfortunately, if Bartleby and Loki succeed, they will have proved God wrong. Since the existence of creation depends on God's infallibility, that existence will come to a screeching halt. To prevent that, Bethany Sloane (Linda Fiorentino) has to stop them from entering the church, or at least that's what the Metatron (Alan Rickman)--God's messenger to humanity--tells her after she douses his pillar of fire with an extinguisher. She'll have two "prophets" to help, but they turn out to be none other than those masters of wall-leaning, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Does anyone not know who this is?), who nonetheless rescue her from a trio of demonic street-hockey players. On the road to New Jersey--literally--they pick up another sidekick: Rufus (Chris Rock), the 13th Apostle, and then learn that there is another player in the game, one who intends for Bartleby and Loki to succeed. In the end, saving existence comes down to Bethany's finding the missing Supreme Deity, who disappeared while on a hiatus to play skeeball.
Long before this darkest of black comedies ever saw the inside of a theater, the Roman Catholic hierarchy raised screams of protest that it demeaned their faith. What they--and the Protestant denominations which remained smugly silent--failed to grasp was that the movie takes a dim view of all organized religion. It also pokes fun at atheists, turning their convoluted intellectual arguments against the existence of a deity into a conman's psychobabble. There's something here to offend anyone whose ideas and beliefs are too shallow to withstand the light of inquiry.
"Mankind," Rufus tells Bethany, "got it all wrong by taking a good idea and building a belief structure on it."
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