Seriously. I mean, it's not like anybody is going to mistake The Ten for Kieślowski's similarly-themed miniseries, but the parallels are more than skin deep: both treat upon the ten commandments in ten short stories that don't really illustrate their nominal subject all that much, each set of ten takes place in an interconnected universe in which the stars of one chapter are bit players in others, and each is overseen by a mysterious figure: the Christ-like Watcher in the original, and Jeff here, played by Paul Rudd in a loose homage to early Woody Allen.

I promised myself I wasn't going to make an Allen comparison. Dammit.

Of course, unlike Dekalog, The Ten isn't necessarily concerned with painfully acute explorations of the moral weaknesses of human beings, but rather with being laid-back and funny. Which is exactly what you'd expect from a film whose creative team that graduated from the MTV series The State (which I haven't seen) and the '80s satire Wet Hot American Summer (which I haven't seen sober).

It's probably better not to have those projects too well in mind, however, because The Ten is, while not "bad," nor "unfunny," surely not as good as it had ought to be. This is the nature of anthology comedy films, perhaps: if Woody Allen and the mad geniuses of Monty Python could barely make Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* and The Meaning of Life work, we should not hold it against the game cast and crew of the current project for making something less - much, much less - than a masterpiece.

The ten segments break down into three types: good ideas that are well-executed, weak ideas that are poorly-executed, and great ideas that don't work. Of course it's the last of these that's the most frustrating, but there's enough goodwill generated by the parts that do work, and by the general sense of mellow good humor, that I can't imagine anybody walking out of the theater harping on the misfires.

And really, those misfires aren't quite as bad as all that: the only truly awful sketch is "Thou Shalt Not Steal," starring Winona Ryder (which is the funniest joke in the whole bit) as a woman who becomes sexually obsessed with a ventriloquist's dummy. It's a single gag stretched out for several minutes beyond the point where we "get it," and "getting it" wasn't all that funny to start with. Otherwise, the failures are mostly examples of a good idea that's only fitfully amusing, rather than constantly hilarious. "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness," a parody of 1930s cartoons is a good example, or Ken Marino's turn as a doctor who kills a patient "as a goof" (a phrase that is genuinely awesome the first time it crops up, but the story wanders and dead-ends amidst grating repetition).

The parts that click, really click. The film's highlight, in my entirely personal opinion, is the contest between Liev Schreiber and Joe Lo Truglio to see who can collect the most CAT Scan machines, with a tiny, lovely cameo by Janeane Garofalo as a nuclear power plant employee. A close second sees Gretchen Mol lose her virginity to Jesus Christ (Justin Theroux), hanging out in Mexico while He procrastinates about the Rapture.

The humor is unmistakably sophomoric and frequently scatological, but all done in a high-minded, literate way. If you're going to go for the shit joke, be clever about it, I suppose. It's not Wilde, but hell, even Chaplin used fart jokes once or twice. And it's really a relief to see humor that assumes its audience is at least somewhat intelligent (there's an extended joke about Dianne Wiest, for God's sake).

The cast is made up predominately of hip, anti-comic comic actors, rather than broad comedians, and that helps tremendously. Schreiber, Mol and (shockingly) Adam Brody stand out, although plenty of other performers acquit themselves most admirably - Marino, Ron Silver, and noted book-on-tape reader Jonathan Davis as a silver-voiced narrator with a penchant for the word "vagina." Really, only two performances fall far beneath the average: Ryder (who is done in by an impossible character) and, disappointingly, Paul Rudd, in his fourth 2007 release. As the force holding the whole set of stories together, Rudd does suffer a bit from the story being told in his interstitial scenes - he's cheating on his wife (Famke Janssen) with a blond floozy (Jessica Alba) - which gets less and less funny and more and more pointless as we move on, and the giant black room it takes place in doesn't do anybody any favors. But granting all that, there's still a dismaying listlessness to so many of his line readings, at least a couple of which should be showstoppers (his obsession with "pec juice" is nowhere near as funny as it wants to be), and we get to see the precise place at which "laid-back" shades into "sleepy."

Still, it's a funny enough thing; when it hits DVD, with all the fast-forwarding and pot-smoking that allows, this will be quite the cult classic. As it stands, it's a nice enough time-waster. It's kind of a perfect August movie, actually: not very challenging, and surely better than spending the same amount of money on, say, Underdog.

6/10, for the barbarically simple reason that I liked-or-loved six of the ten segments.