Religulous

As I watched the first 50 minutes of Religulous, Bill Maher's anti-religion documentary, I had a familiar feeling. I soon realized that the film was working for me in the same way that Maher's great HBO show works for me: a sharp observation of important issues served with a sizable helping of humor. And I thought, "Wow, if he can pull off making a full-length film be just as good as so many of his episodes, then this should definitely turn out to be a good documentary." The goal is almost achieved, but not quite.

The first half of Religulous features some great moments in which the interviewer essentially outwits followers of Christianity into revealing just how crazy and outlandish their staunch beliefs are, at least according to Maher. These scenes are especially marked by several instances in which audience members will surely gasp and say "Oh my God! He did not just say that to him" followed immediately by a fit of laughter. Those who criticize Maher's film for being one-sided are correct only in the sense that Maher makes his viewpoints quite clear, but the way he operates isn't unethical in the least bit, because you get a sense during the interviews that those he questions are being given a completely fair shot at defending their beliefs. Sure, as with all documentaries, editing was surely used adroitly to skew things even more in favor of Maher's thesis, but much of the footage depicting Maher's interviewees contradicting themselves and unsure of how to respond to certain questions is enough to make us aware that we're not being manipulated here.

Unfortunately, the second half of Religulous descends into mediocre territory. Maher makes a decision to stop focusing solely on Christianity and to cover Islam and Judaism as well. This is a respectable decision in the sense that it shows that the arrows aren't being aimed at just one target, but the problem is that as soon as it moves in this direction, the movie curiously loses its sense of humor, and becomes a fact-spewing film that drives on neutral and doesn't add much insight to the proceedings. Instead, it just rehashes much of what has already been said in the film (minus the humor), which leads to a feeling that the filmmakers just ran out of steam at this point. In this second half, Religulous also provides brief commentary on Mormonism and Scientology, but these segments are half-assed and feel more like filler than anything else. The final few minutes of the film feature Maher summing up his already-evident thesis into a final statement, and while he is undoubtedly eloquent in his closing remarks, this moment is edited with a jumble of sequences featuring explosions in order to reference the Apocalypse, and all they do is make this feel way too grandiose and self-important, in what would've worked as a more straightforward and simple final declaration.

One gets the feeling that the first 50 minutes of Maher's documentary would've made for a terrific episode of his TV show, with a perfect balance between insight and comedy. But everything that follows it is entirely unnecessary, thus making Religulous not exactly work as a full-length motion picture.

5/10