Day of the 'Dog: "Saved!" Review

IMDb Score: 7.0

Why it didn't do too hot: Despite a decent IMDb score, I think that a lot of people - critics, reporters, and potential viewers - thought that Saved! was a movie about getting saved, and finding out that Christ is the way and the light.

No matter what your religious preference, such a movie would have only a narrow audience, and would even turn off some practicing Christians, let alone those with no religious preference.

Forget the subtle point that this movie had nothing to do with converting people to join the crusade of Christ. It wasn't the opposite, either.

Why it deserves dog status: Despite being hilarious by having a sort of fly-on-the-wall feel as to how evangelical Christian communities operate, peeking into their minds and seeing how their orthodox opinions manifest, it's also a story about doubt, something that seems all too demonized nowadays.

When a politician shows ambivalence on a certain issue, or shows doubt on how efficacious certain solutions are to our societal problems, s/he is immediately labeled a "flip-flopper" as if having doubts is indicative of a tepid, poor leader. Even followers, as we would be made to believe, are confined to having orthodox opinions lest they be dubbed "fence-sitters" which - particularly in religion - holds utterly negative connotations.

Saved! revolves around the lives of a group of teens who are really a random sample of American society at large: with Mandy Moore's character being the blindly orthodox (so long as it serves her) type of Christian, Jena Malone playing the truly tested, confused, and curious Christian (which there should be many, many more of), and a wheelchair-bound Macaulay Culkin being the pariah with no faith to speak of who's actually driven further away by orthodoxy.

The film remains - above all - quite funny, making light of some conventional wisdom surrounding Christ (like if he's a white guy) showing how those of the cloth have adapted to appeal to younger kids via a priest who does a flip onto the stage/pulpit, and even deals with homosexuality more from the ground level, without claiming some moral high ground or insisting on how to feel about it.

So don't think of Saved! as Jesus Camp or Caught; think of it as Drop Dead Gorgeous - with lots of Christians.