Director:David Wain
Although it’s comprised of ten vignettes that use the biblical Ten Commandments as a jumping-off point, those who are overly devout or easily offended may want to skip director David Wain’s irreverent, unbalanced, yet undeniably hilarious The Ten. Hosted by Paul Rudd whose character finds himself breaking one of the commandments himself by being torn between his beautiful, loyal wife Famke Janssen or the young, sexy film buff Jessica Alba, the offbeat comedy The Ten which begins with a cautionary tale of a young man (Adam Brody) who jumps out of a plane without a parachute, only to find himself stuck in the ground where he’s worshipped as a false God but still finds time to party and star in his own television show, gets progressively more outrageous with each successive story.
Featuring a relative who’s who of comedians and actors, we soon encounter Gretchen Mol as a buttoned up thirty-something virgin librarian who has a summer fling while vacationing in Mexico with a carpenter named Jesus, a surgeon who leaves a pair or scissors inside a patient as “a goof,” Oliver Platt as an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator who becomes a surrogate father to teen black twins, Liev Schreiber as a jealous father who tries to out buy his neighbor in the cat scan machine market, a man who covets a prison wife and of course, Winona Ryder who steals a ventriloquist’s dummy with whom she falls in love while on her honeymoon. Also featuring Justin Theroux, Bobby Cannavale, and others, despite its uneven nature as some of the more ridiculous plots and characters do detract from the overall success, The Ten is compulsively watchable and sure to interest devotees of sketch comedy.
