In this day and age, when millions can find salvation in a Mel Gibson blood-and-guts spectacle, organized religion is ripe for a cinematic skewering. But Saved! isn't the movie to do it. It makes the same mistake so many other weak-kneed satires make: It wants to savagely poke fun at its characters but also wants us to love them for who they are.
Mary (Jena Malone) and Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore) are enjoying their senior year at a top Christian school. That is, until Mary winds up pregnant after trying to "rescue" her gay boyfriend by sleeping with him. With the help of the school's only Jewish student (Eva Amurri) and Hilary Faye's wheelchair-bound brother (an adult Macaulay Culkin, now with a surprising amount of charisma and presence), Mary tries to hide her dirty secret from the rest of the school.
Saved! begins with a wondrously vicious first act, setting up the satire before we know or care anything about the characters. In one scene, Mary and Hilary Faye even take a recreational trip to a shooting range called An Eye for an Eye. But before long, the film begins to adopt boring screenwriter's tools like character arcs and—heaven help us—yet another third act taking place at the prom.
It probably took a lot of compromising for writer-director Brian Dannelly and co-writer Michael Urban to get Saved! made at all. But the point of satire is to get in under the radar, and noses, of your targets. If done well, the venom will spatter well outside their reality and they won't know what hit them. Preston Sturges did it better than anyone with 1944's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, which should have offended every censor alive, but was still released intact. More recently, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor's Citizen Ruth and Election showed how a modern satirist could work. Election succeeded so beautifully because of secondary characters who stood outside the fracas and looked in with cynicism and wit, and because their villainess, Tracy Flick, was so deliciously and enjoyably warped.
There are people who could use a dose of this movie's message of tolerance. But by turning Christians into irredeemable villains with little dimension, Saved! only preaches to the converted.