Keeping with the randomness of the project, one of the stories is even animated. And one of the best is the “thou shalt not murder” story, featuring a doctor who leaves a pair of scissors in a just-operated-on woman as a goof. “You goofed?” asks the woman’s incredulous husband. “No, no, as a goof,” the doc responds. See, he likes to goof. (I promise I’m not trying to give away the funny parts; that one was in the trailer.) The doctor is played by Ken Marino, who co-wrote the story with director Wain and should, with any luck, finally have a lucrative comedy career ahead of him.

Strangely enough, despite the concept of the movie, there’s not a whole lot of religion in it; the Ten Commandments just act as the jumping-off points to tell the stories. The only explicitly religious-themed story involves an uptight women (Mol) who has an affair with a man (Justin Theroux) who turns out to be the Second Coming of Jesus, who’s stalling before he has to deal with the whole Armageddon thing. It could’ve easily been mean-spirited or anti-Christian, but all those crying blasphemy should relax; it’s obviously not a real representation of how the filmmakers view Jesus, and like the rest of the stories, it’s just having a little fun. Ditto with the “honor the Sabbath” story: a guy skips church every Sunday in order to hang out at his house in the nude with all his guy friends. A think piece on closeted homosexuality among suburb-dwelling Christian men? Nope, just trying to make you laugh.

An aside: actually, I did learn something about religion thanks to this movie. The Roman Catholic version of the Ten Commandments is actually slightly different from the Protestant version. Catholics split the “coveting” part into two separate commandments (don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, and don’t covet your neighbor’s belongings), while Protestants instead split “thou shalt have no other gods before me” and “thou shalt not make an idol” into two separate commandments. Jewish teaching is different still: they connect those two as a single unit like the Catholics, and they connect the coveting rules as a single unit like the Protestants, but they single out “I am the Lord thy God” as its own commandment. For the four or five of you who haven’t stopped reading this paragraph yet, The Ten uses the Roman Catholic version.

Movie Grade: A-

Synopsis:

"The Ten" is comprised of ten blasphemous and hysterical stories inspired by the Biblical Commandments, each told in a different style, but with characters and themes that overlap. The film is held together by a ...