DOGMA, a Catholic-baiting, wildly irreverent comedy from director Kevin Smith, is like PRIEST, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and other works that have left the pious riled and spluttering. It’s both sacred and profane. A series of hilarious disclaimers set the tone of the film.

Overall, it is an ultimately sanctimonious fable about a ragtag assortment of humans and celestial beings who strive to prevent a pair of fallen angels from reentering paradise via a loophole in Church dogma. Should the renegade seraphim succeed, humankind is toast. Cut out the film’s obscenity, violence and purposeful, parochial button-pushing, and what’s left is a Catholic schoolboy’s adolescent, though wholly sincere, rebellion against the rigidity of religious doctrine.

But Smith, who previously directed CLERKS, is by no means in a league with the stylish, savagely unorthodox filmmaker Luis Bunuel. He’s a true believer who came of age during the ascendancy of Beavis and Butthead.

For a while, the film is screamingly funny, but the further it goes, the more muddled the narrative becomes. Originally three hours long, the story may well have been more coherent before Smith made an hour’s worth of cuts. But despite the frantic pacing and antic performances, it begins to stall in the middle of the second act when the silliness is supplanted by preachiness, the tone becomes needlessly dark, and characters who do not seem so inclined become gratuitously violent.

Though lumbering and overwrought, Smith’s DOGMA sometimes succeeds thanks to his unpredictable imagination. But perhaps the main problem is that it is grounded in his mantra as professed by the Muse in the film: “It doesn’t matter what you have faith in – just that you have faith.” Ooohh. Something tells me he’s not about to win any new converts.