www.dogma-movie.com ‘Dogma’ gets ***, but the satirical Buddy Jesus ikon gets ****.

Early reports painted Kevin Smith’s new movie, “Dogma,” as a daredevil attack on Christianity, exciting the director’s fans while putting religious conservatives in the not-so-unique position of condemning a film they haven’t seen. Now the truth can be known: “Dogma” is a sprawling, messy comic fantasy bursting with insight — and, in roughly equal proportions, with pointless folderol, misdirected piety and plain-ol’ crap both literal and metaphysic.

The movie concerns two angels, Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck). Kicked out of Heaven eons ago for insubordination — Loki was the Death Angel until he wearied of slaughtering firstborn — the homesick angels set out for a New Jersey church that promises remission of sins to anyone who passes through its doors on a certain day.

Unfortunately, their restoration to Heaven would prove God fallible after all, thus destroying the fabric of reality. To stop them, God dispatches doubt-ridden, Catholic abortion-clinic worker Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), guided by Jesus’ “thirteenth disciple” Rufus (Chris Rock) and Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith), the slapstick stoner duo who appear in all Smith films.

If it sounds convoluted so far, just wait. Bartleby and Loki realize they’re being followed, which leads to a crisis of conscience for Loki (he doesn’t want to destroy the universe) and pushes Bartleby over the edge: he loses his temper with the human race and angrily declares war on God. Bartleby’s downfall, from affable seraph to Miltonian monster, provides one of the film’s truly potent images of evil, but little time is spent developing it. Screenwriter Smith has his hands full trying to get the cast to New Jersey before the film ends, what with Jay’s frequent stops at strip joints and childish attempts to get Linda into bed.

By the time Smith throws in a Satanic assailant (Jason Lee), a former Muse who works as an exotic dancer (Selma Hayek), a “s--t demon” and the thoroughest Deus ex machina ending since the ancient Greeks, the movie is cracking at its seams.

Smith insists that he is a devout and sincere Catholic, a claim I have neither right nor desire to dispute. What I can say is that “Dogma,” as a story of Good vs. Evil, is held in check by a flat picture of both. Smith spends much time denouncing sin, ’90s-style, which means that he comes down on the sins of the rich and conservative (Loki bulletholes the board of an entertainment company for idolatry; the Church gets it for materialism) but not on the cheerio misogyny of Jay. Neither does Smith touch on the implications of Bethany’s involvement in the abortion industry; the clinic is there, it seems, solely so Smith can make fun of the protestors congealing around it. In effect, he renders certain sins “cute” while demonizing those of the cultural groups that don’t go to Kevin Smith films. Bartleby’s spiritual corruption relieves this imbalance somewhat, since the audience identifies with Bartleby; but insofar as the film is used to demonize those with whom Smith disagrees, it is a cheap and unworthy piece of art.

I discuss “Dogma”’s moral flaws because they lead so naturally to its filmic ones. The movie’s unreflexive, self-exonerating picture of evil, for example, gives us the feeling that Smith is using his plot to preach; rather than knowing his characters and letting the story grow from them, he sticks everyone with an attitude and shoves them into plot twist after plot twist until he’s said all he wants to say.

Smith is careful to make his heroes impious and full of doubt, a method employed admirably by Frederick Buechner and the author of Genesis but which fails here because the characters seem to be ciphers, rhetorical tools in the hands of the director, rather than people. Bartleby changes so abruptly into an antihero, for example, that we wonder if Smith simply needed a Lucifer-like villain to push things along. Bethany makes a few angry speeches to God, then assumes the hero’s mantle. Rufus serves as an engaging mouthpiece for Smith’s critiques of race and little more. Jay and Silent Bob are ... Jay and Silent Bob. In all cases, changes either do not occur in the protagonists’ personalities or, when they do, are unconvincing because the character is insufficiently set up beforehand.

Much of this may be the result of pre-release cuts; Smith’s original three-hour cut of the film may have told a more cohesive story. But I suspect that “Dogma” would be fundamentally formless in any case. Its creator uses every opportunity to tell us that form, in terms of the faith questions the movie asks, is exactly the church’s problem. “I don’t have beliefs about God,” says Rufus at one point. “I have ideas. You can change ideas.” If Smith is trying to tell us that we should stop sniping at each other over fine points of doctrine, I’m on his bandwagon; if, as is more likely, he’s suggesting soft-serve religion, in which we try to feel piety and respect toward “the sacredness of life” without committing to any specifics about the way such realities should shape our daily existence, he’s dead wrong. And a refusal to think through the implications of life’s sacredness in a careful, serious manner translates almost directly to formless, lumpy works of art — works that preach instead of picture. If you’re not willing to deal with the consequences of ideas for life, you sure aren’t gonna do it for some movie.

What I have here is a laundry list of ways that “Dogma” fails as a piece of art. Perhaps it’s a measure of Smith’s talent that the film still manages to evoke suspense, pathos and hysterical laughter as well as groans of incredulity. If I’m hard on Smith, it’s because he’s already made a movie (“Chasing Amy”) that succeeds where “Dogma” doesn’t: convincing characters who change convincingly; a plot that feels organic rather than manufactured; a story that, we feel, is told for its own sake and not for the sake of the really great ideas Kevin Smith wants to tell us about. And I think, once Smith works through some of his questions and arrives at a set of values (in addition to tolerance) that he feels are worth communicating, he’ll make a great religious film. But he hasn’t done it here; at best, he’s made a great religious cartoon.