READ MORE: 'The Ten' Cast and Crew Break the Rules

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PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/3/07)

Currently a ubiquitous face due to his associations with the State posse as well as Judd Apatow's crew, Paul Rudd addresses the camera as our storybook narrator, alone on a dark soundstage save two giant stone tablets. From his entrance, in which he's fighting with his wife (Famke Janssen) on the phone, there's something forced and uncinematic about the whole conceit, a too-loose delivery that feels as hurriedly scripted as what the SNL factory churns out weekly. Even with name talent like Janssen (along with Schreiber, Ryder, Mol, Silver, and more), only one of the segments maintains momentum after its setup, in which Mol has an unexpected love affair in Mexico with a local who turns out to be Jesus Christ (Justin Theroux). He's a false god, get it?

Not to bring up Kieslowski again, but the convention of overlapping characters among the commandment segments (one of which is animated) aren't done with a lick of finesse as they are in, say, The Three Colors Trilogy. Wain and Marino are instead content with making the cameos themselves the lone punch line, just as so many other punch lines are disposable celebrity references (Rudd tells his ex he's dating Dianne Wiest, Oliver Platt shows up as a Schwarzenegger impersonator, two boys are told their father is Arsenio Hall, and Mol name-checks herself in song). The half-assed comedy on display is filled with scatological cheap shots and long-winded non sequiturs that don't know how to exit elegantly (a problem that plagued many skits on The State). Schreiber and his suburban neighbor bitterly compete over who can buy more CAT scan machines than the other, which is the extent of that bit's potential. Ryder falls in love with a ventriloquist's dummy, and bless her for slobbering all over said puppet for our benefit, but where's the real-world relevancy or bite in an age in which religion has come to the forefront of our sociopolitical identity?

The Ten has one foot in Monty Python's Meaning of Life and another in their Life of Brian, but ultimately we get the David Letterman School of Comedy: mediocre jokes continually repeated until they sometimes become uncomfortably funny. As Homer Simpson gripes at the beginning of The Simpsons Movie, why pay for something that you can watch on TV for free?

– Aaron Hillis