Click Here For Our Interview with Paul Rudd

The Ten

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

The Ten presents us with a simple enough idea: we will see ten short stories, each of them thematically linked to a different one of the Ten Commandments. Why, you ask? No reason; the movie doesn’t mean anything, even though at the end it pretends to. Star Paul Rudd was quite happy to admit on Leno the other night that that last scene, which features the entire cast explaining (through a sing-along) what the point was, is completely unearned.

And yet The Ten works for the very basic reason that it’s completely hilarious.

All the stories are linked in the sense that the characters often pop up in different capacities, and past events are often referenced; a peripheral character in one turns out to be the lead of another. You get the idea. Setting all the stories in the same world also has the benefits of providing us with an untold number of throwaway and sight gags, some of which I’m sure I missed. An example: one character that appears in two or three of the stories is always introduced in such a way that we initially think he’s a small person. No reason necessary; it’s just a reward for the close observer, and like the rest of the movie, is both pointless and amusing.

Rudd is the host of the program. He introduces each story, and in order to give the movie a bit of a through-line, has an unfolding storyline himself that eventually becomes one of the ten. Along with Rudd, the cast features faces that will be familiar to any fans of Wet Hot American Summer or MTV’s The State: Ken Marino, David Wain (who also directed), Kerri Kenney, A.D. Miles, and a few more. It also lands a ton of much more recognizable names: Liev Schreiber, Famke Janssen, Jessica Alba, Winona Ryder, Oliver Platt, Gretchen Mol, Adam Brody, and more.

Most of these guys are great character actors, and very few of them are known to headline their own movies; in this sort of movie, that works great, since each one gets their own individual chance to appear, do something that’s usually bizarre and hilarious, and then fade into the background again. Some are bound to stand out more than others: Schreiber is surprisingly deadpan and hilarious as a father in the suburbs who decides his family needs a CAT-scan machine after his neighbor gets one. (You guessed it, that features one of the “don’t covet” commandments.) And Brody, who’s much, much more at home in small roles like this than in lead roles in crappy movies like In the Land of Women, had me cracking up as a guy who, through some odd circumstances, is forced to live his life half-buried in the ground. “Ahh, I can’t move!” he cries to the heavens when faced with his girlfriend running ...