C

Fundamentalist Christian education is certainly a subject ripe for satirizing, but this feeble feature from writer-director Brian Dannelly picks meager comedic fruit from the fertile tree. “Saved!” should have been a sharp, pointed and prolonged assault on fanaticism and smugness, but in the event its jabs at those targets are obvious and weak, and for the most part it chooses instead to be a banal, bathetic high school soap opera, more maudlin than merry. It even ends at the prom. Could anything be greater evidence of its failure of imagination?

Sweet-faced cherub Jenna Malone stars as Mary, one of the most responsible, dedicated students at American Eagle Christian High School, who observes of herself at one point that she’s been born again all her life. It appears she has an almost a perfect life: her father might be dead, but her mother Lillian (Mary-Louise Parker) is an understanding sort, even if she is a bit distracted by her affair with Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), the school principal who’s separated from his wife. Mary is also an important member of the chief campus clique, the Christian Jewels, a female singing group headed by Jesus freak Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore), and she has what appears to be a flawless boyfriend in hunky Dean (Chad Faust). Things change abruptly when Dean announces to her that he’s gay. A pseudo-vision caused by a bump on the head persuades Mary that she can cure him by sacrificing her virginity to Dean, thereby correcting his sinful condition. The cure, unfortunately, proves worse than the disease. Not only does Dean remain unchanged (he’s soon shipped off to a Christian treatment center, where his predilection is strengthened rather than suppressed), but Mary finds herself pregnant.

So far, so good; the satirical quotient of “Saved!” until this point isn’t strong, but the set-up is promising. Unfortunately, from here the character of the piece really changes. Mary’s situation causes a crisis of faith, and her doubts soon cause Hilary Faye and her posse to drop her. (There’s more than a hint of the cliched “Mean Girls” syndrome here, though without the panache that Tina Fey recently brought to it: the mean girls in this case are just hypocritical Christians.) The poor thing is, however, assisted by the campus outsiders, Cassandra (Eva Amurri), the sole Jew among the students, who acts as a kind of agent provocateur on campus, and Hilary Faye’s sweetly cynical brother Roland (Macaulay Culkin), who’s in a wheelchair and is treated by his sister as her personal cross to bear. Mary also catches the eye of Pastor Skip’s recently-arrived son Patrick (Patrick Fugit), a skateboarding dude who’s as tolerant as his father is rigid. Unhappily, Hilary Faye gets interested in Patrick, so his obvious feeling for Mary is yet another reason for the fanatic’s resentment against her erstwhile friend.

One can imagine something like this scenario played out with mean-spirited gusto, but Dannelly and his co-writer Michael Urban don’t choose that path. Instead they turn their story into a rather preachy, comedically crude plea for open-mindedness and acceptance of different views. Mary, Cassandra and Roland become heroic rebels brutally treated by the stridently self-righteous Hilary Faye, who sinks to duplicitous, cruel efforts to destroy them all, while Patrick flits about the edges of the action, representing a bemused voice of reason. (Further in the background are Skip and Lillian, who must work out their relationship.) The culmination comes at the prom, where Hilary Faye’s veneer of smug respectability is torn away and she must admit her wrongdoing, though without apology. Dean even shows up with his significant other to celebrate. Throughout all these complexities the expected satire gives way to comedy that’s alternately bland and forced, and more often to mawkish melodramatics. Instead of the Kubrickian malice of “Dr. Strangelove,” the picture instead adopts the heart-on-sleeve John Hughes attitude of “The Breakfast Club” (lacking even the sprightly raunchiness of “Sixteen Candles”). The picture lobs mushy softballs at its fundamentalist target rather than the hard-nosed bullets one hopes for.

Among the cast, Malone cuts a likable if saccharine figure, and Culkin shows an ease that he didn’t begin to suggest in “Party Monster,” indicating that he has a real future on screen; so does the easygoing Fugit. On the other hand, while one appreciates Moore’s willingness to move into new territory by playing so unsympathetic a character, she’s overly strident in the part (too much venom, too little humor), and Amurri comes on awfully strong, too. Donovan, looking ever more like Andrew McCarthy, and the laid-back Parker appear somewhat trapped in poorly-written roles. But Heather Matarazzo does her geek bit to perfection as a wallflower who desperately wants into the Christian Jewels. For a low budget effort “Saved!” looks fine, with a brightly-colored design and solid cinematography. The eclectic soundtrack is interesting, too.

But as a whole “Saved!” comes nowhere near scoring a satirical bull’s-eye–a pity, given that its target is such an inviting one.

C-

Blizzards, tornados and floods–oh, my! It’s absurd that this new big-budget disaster epic from Roland Emmerich, director of that masterpiece of subtlety “Independence Day,” should have become the subject of intense political debate. “The Day After Tomorrow” may use global warming as its plot key, the thing that unleashes waves of devastation on the world, but nobody could possibly think that it treats the issue with the slightest degree of intelligence or insight. The movie is just a brainless orgy of special effects periodically interrupted by sappy human-interest episodes; it’s founded on the shakiest dramatic ground, and for anyone to become seriously exercised over it, pro or con, is about as plausible as if “Armageddon” had been protested by a group called “Asteroids ’R Us.” No Irwin Allen movie ever depicted so much mindless mayhem, or fielded such an army of stock characters to perish or make breathless escapes from impending destruction.

The two main stick figures in the mix are Jack Hall (an overwrought, pained-looking Dennis Quaid), a scientist whose research in Antarctica has persuaded him that the earth may be on the brink of a new Ice Age, ushered in by climatic disasters all over the world. He tries futilely to persuade the national administration to take emergency measures in an attempt to head off the catastrophe, but he’s got to fight an uncomprehending bureaucracy–led by a supremely dismissive vice president–at the same time that he tries to rescue his high school-age son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal, looking much too old for the role) from New York City, where the kid is trapped as the metropolis experiences severe flooding, dangerously falling temperatures and massive snowfall. Various other barely recognizable faces pop up among the tidal waves, hailstorms, hurricanes, and other assorted phenomena (among them, if you can believe it, marauding wolves!)–Emmy Rossum (as the sweet girl Sam worships from afar), Dash Mihok (as Jack’s young assistant), Jay O. Sanders (as his old one), Sela Ward (as Jack’s wife, a nurse who puts her own life on the line to care for an adorable young cancer patient), Tamlyn Tomita (as a NASA scientist), et al.–but they’re all just bits of potential human debris looking concerned and endangered amidst the rubble. Lending a note of impish gravity against Quaid’s frenzied excess and Gyllenhaal’s gangly heroism is Ian Holm, as a British scientist who comments on the dire situation from his cavernous enclave in Scotland, whence he issues messages of doom and gloom in that well-known clipped voice of his while keeping a stiff upper lip till his generator putters out.

The New York segments of “The Day After Tomorrow” are basically “Godzilla” (another Emmerich effort) without the dinosaur–lots of destruction of well-known landmarks, with wailing winds, walls of water and ice and snow replacing the growls and stomping feet of a big lizard. None of the actors are important, and they go through their paces about as memorably as Tommy Lee Jones did in “Volcano” (this sort of picture is hardly a vehicle for thespian depth). The only issue is whether the special effects make the grade. The answer, in a nutshell, is that they’re good enough, but pretty redundant and not terribly exciting; once you’ve watched one wave splashing over traffic or skyscraper being dismembered by gales, the sight tends to lose impact, and vast ice-covered vistas over which ant-sized humans are trudging aren’t visually entrancing even when the Chrysler Building looms up out of them. The result is rather like watching a video game that’s decided to do completely without the interactive element; what’s the point? In between the big weather-related moments are banal episodes of scientific technobabble, youthful romance, political infighting and courageous self-sacrifice, all marked by dialogue that’s equal parts melodramatic twaddle and juvenile gallows humor. The goal is to string all the elements together in a chain that increases in tension as it goes; but in actuality the narrative grows more and more preposterous and illogical as it proceeds. An insanely bombastic score by Harald Kloser tries to pump things up, but it only adds to the air of the ridiculous, particularly when it slims down to a booming thuds at particularly nerve-wracking moments.

About the only thing in “The Day After Tomorrow” that you might find entertaining, depending on your political point of view, is the characterization of the President (Perry King) as a clueless empty suit and the Vice President (Kenneth Welsh) as a hard-bitten control freak to whom his “boss” mostly defers and who resolutely espouses economic arguments against the doom-saying of environmental alarmists. Of course, these are cartoonish versions of the real thing, but they will have some plausibility for viewers of a certain political persuasion–until the V.P., thrust into the top job, learns humility and the danger of fooling with Mother Nature after the world has been ushered into a new Ice Age, and is suddenly transformed into a enlightened fellow. Here the political observations of the picture, crude as they might have been, enter the goofy Fantasy Land that the rest of the picture has inhabited from the very first frame, and even the sole oasis of real humor the flick enjoyed disappears in a wallow of forced uplift.

My advice about the movie is the same as that which the frightened government is finally persuaded to issue to all residents of the northern states concerning the megastorm that’s socking their region: Just stay in your houses until it blows over.