Now I like Kevin Smith. Sometimes the humor is a little low brow, but there's something hard to resist about his movies.

Dogma was Smith's first script, actually, which he waited to make until he felt it could be done right. People do get attached to their ideas, and I fear the aging process did not result in a much improved script here.

Now, there's a problem with the basic premise. Supposedly, the universe will cease to exist if god is proven fallible. Our heroes are trying to prevent two fallen angels from doing just that. Now logically, if there's anything to prevent, any actual loophole, then its existence is enough to create a contradiction. The world has already ceased to exist, and the events of the movie never really happened.

Okay, that's looking at it from one extreme, but the other way for making it work is to say that contradictions are okay, in which case the characters are all deluded and the events of the movie don't really make any difference, which drastically reduces the meaning of what the movie is supposed to be.

It's also inconsistent in lesser, but telling ways. These Stygian Triplets are used as muscle by one of the baddies, and they are shown to usually be pretty efficient in dealing out their damage. But when they get dispatched to take out our main character, they inexplicable dawdle in their task and the omnipresent (at least in Smith's movies) stoners Jay and Silent Bob stumble on the scene and save the day. It's not a problem unique to this movie, but just another sample of these issues.

And also, the self-referentialness of the movie to the Kevin Smith universe becomes annoying, and gets in the way of the movie itself. There's a few two many winks at the camera, a few two many wide-eyed shots of Smith as Silent Bob.

There is merit here, some interesting ideas and perspectives, but it suffers from preachiness and other problems. You'll enjoy it more if you take it less seriously (than I).