Reviewed by Anne Wollenberg
Featuring Bill Maher, Julie Maher, Kathy Maher, Dean Hamer, Andrew Newberg,
Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda and lots of bizarre religious people | Written by Bill Maher
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £17.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 97 minutes | Directed by Larry Charles
Say you disagree with a particular political party. You think all its members, supporters and voters are stupid. So you make a documentary showing how stupid they are. You film yourself telling them they’re stupid, talking over them and laughing in their faces.
They look stupid. So do you. The problem with Religulous is that it has been engineered to prove a point. Political stand-up Bill Maher has decided all religion is crap, so he’s going to make a documentary to prove how crap it is, rather than trying to find out if it actually is crap. Make sure you’re sitting down because this is a major revelation nobody’s thought of before: Maher reckons nobody knows why we’re here or what happens after we die, and that the bible is a work of fiction. This amazing realisation is apparently license to embark on a mission to discredit every aspect of religion, which would be fine if only it had been done in an informed, intelligent way.
There’s a brief mention of evolution, although we don’t find out whether Maher has read On the Origin of the Species, or if he knows what, if anything, it says about religion (guess what – Charles Darwin didn’t say you had to be an atheist). There’s no mention of Richard Dawkins. Or, for that matter, Karl Marx, who beat Maher to the realisation that you can equate religion with dope. Maher talks to, or rather over, everyone from Mormons to scientologists to a US senator who helps his case by pointing out that there’s no IQ test required to join the senate, one of the few laugh-out-loud moments in what is apparently supposed to be a comedy.
He also engages in a spot of pop philosophy, debating the merits of objective morality (or rather asking if we’d still believe we shouldn’t kill each other if the bible didn’t say so) although he doesn’t seem to have heard of any of the relevant arguments about that, either. This being fine if you’re having a conversation in the pub, but not so much if you’re lecturing people on why you’ve decided they’re wrong. You may think religion is crap, but the fact is that a lot of people on the planet are religious and going around laughing at them saying: “Haha! You believe in a talking snake!” isn’t going to help us all get along. Actually trying to understand the thinking behind religion is, and somebody who’s woken up and decided that all religious people are dumb isn’t best-equipped to do this. Maher has also confused two different issues: faith, and whether you should have it, and religion as the cause of a lot of the bad shit that happens in the world.
Religulous does for religious people what Borat did for Americans – and indeed, they share the same director. If it had anything new or interesting to say, it might have been worth watching. What it actually does is regurgitate the same criticisms of religion that have been appearing on A level sociology papers for years. It’s supposed to be a documentary, but it won’t teach you anything new unless you know nothing about any of the major world religions, in which case it will feed you a few generalisations and that’s about it. And if you already believe that religious people are idiots, hey, don’t pay to see this film, just go to your nearest church or synagogue and point and laugh at a few people, because the effect will be much the same.
EXTRAS Surprisingly, there are absolutley no extras at all. I say surprisingly because the Region 1 release features an audio commentary with Maher and Charles, Monologues from Around the World, and deleted scenes. Once again, DVD buyers here in the UK are being shortchanged. The distributors should be ashamed of themselves.