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Saved! (2004): 4/10

Poster (c) MGM/UA

In this no-holds-barred society of ours, almost anything can and will be satirized. Most recent is Saved!, which made small splashes at various film festivals (it was the closing film at the Philadelphia Film Festival). It tries to be this biting satire on religion and teenage fanaticism, but ends up being this lukewarm mediation on Christianity and following the Bible. For future reference, I'm Jewish, but, thankfully, I did not need a crash Sunday school course for this movie. Although a Sunday school class probably would have been funnier than Saved!.

Mary (Jena Malone) gleefully attends a Catholic high school along with Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore). When her boyfriend (Chad Faust) admits to her that he thinks he's gay, she gets a supposed vision from Jesus to try to straighten him out, so to speak. Mary has sex with him as a last resort and winds up pregnant. She then has to hide that fact as various unnecessary things occur and Macaulay Culkin, as a paraplegic, steals every scene that he's in (even more so than Mandy Moore).

Any joke they made about the Bible failed. Any joke they made about the one Jewish girl being a "rebel" failed. Any joke they made about Culkin's disability failed. In fact, almost every joke failed. There were two, three jokes that I barely laughed at. But soon everything got old and repetitive, and all of the characters become annoying and grating (all except Culkin's Roland...there was something about his character that really stuck with me). Although Roland didn't make me laugh, he was an interesting character, at least. That's not to say that all of the characters weren't interesting. They were, for the first 20 minutes. Then they just became almost like caricatures of themselves. And caricatures are almost never funny.

Malone can't seem to make her character believable. Her voice-over work is overdone, yet her actual acting leaves something to be desired. I want the good ol' days of Donnie Darko. It's also sad to think that Saved! is probably her most commercial film to date. She can be good, but not in this. Moore seems to be enjoying herself, and if she sticks to movies like this instead of Chasing Liberty, people will soon forget about her mediocre singing career. But the standout is Culkin. He looks like a cool guy in real life, and he takes his sarcastic persona into his role here, and finally breaks away from his child-star days. It's more than we can say about his siblings (Kieran, Igby Goes Down and Rory, Signs).

The general gist of Saved! isn't really that terribly bad. The plot is mildly interesting, and could have worked successfully as a drama. Yet it goes for the laughs and fails each and every time. Saved! could have saved itself, but since it didn't, the only thing it has going for it is Culkin, but it's just not good enough.

Rated PG-13 for strong thematic issues involving teens - sexual content, pregnancy, smoking and language.

Review Date: June 12, 2004