Forget Netflix’s The Rip, Dogma is still peak Ben Affleck and Matt Damon

Netflix’s new cop thriller The Rip is receiving critical praise in large part for its use of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in the leading roles. While I heartily believe movies like this belong on the big screen instead of going straight to streaming, The Rip is a good, well-written movie and both Affleck and Damon are solid in it — an easy win for Netflix.That said, the based-on-a-true story film about two crooked Miami narcotics officers makes me long for a very different kind of movie with the duo. One that, while quite literally being about the end of the world, is also just a really good, funny, lighthearted hang which captures the chemistry of the two friends as effectively as any other film they’ve done together.

I’m talking, of course, about Kevin Smith’s Dogma.

Released in 1999, Dogma tells the story of two fallen angels who have spent eons on Earth after being banished there by God. Damon plays Loki, who was God’s angel of death until he quit thanks, in large part, to his pal Bartleby (Affleck). While God had intended for them to spend eternity on Earth, when a New Jersey Catholic church plans an upcoming rededication, it creates something called a “plenary indulgence,” which erases the sins of anyone who passes through its doorway. By having their slates wiped clean, Loki and Bartleby will finally be allowed to return to heaven. (Yes, it’s an entire movie hinged on a biblical loophole.)

However, as Alan Rickman’s Metatron (another angel) explains in the film, Loki and Bartleby doing this would prove God to be fallible, thus unraveling all of existence. So to stop Loki and Bartleby, Heaven appoints Jesus Christ’s last living relative (Linda Fiorentino), who teams with a muse (Salma Hayek) and a dead apostle (Chris Rock). Lastly, fortunately or unfortunately, she’s given the help of two prophets, Kevin Smith’s signature weed-dealing slackers, Jay and Silent Bob.

Dogma was Kevin Smith’s fourth film following Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy. And while Clerks is, and always will be, Smith’s most important work thanks to its cultural relevance, much of its genius comes from its lack of a story. Dogma, however, features Smith’s biggest, best narrative, while still capturing the raw, funny, conversational energy that is Smith’s trademark. And while Fiorentino is technically Dogma’s protagonist, much of the story and the film’s heaviest, and headiest, conversations are shouldered on the winged backs of Damon and Affleck.

To get at the plot first, once Loki and Bartleby discover the upcoming creation of the biblical loophole, they set out for New Jersey from Wisconsin. Along the way, Loki figures he can get back in God’s good graces by picking up the mantle he’d renounced centuries earlier as God’s angel of death. With that, he goes about killing sinners in the name of God, most notably a board room full of greedy corporate bigwigs who run a fast food chain named Mooby’s.

Throughout this crusade, so to speak, Loki and Bartleby each experience character arcs that cause them to reverse their positions around each other. Originally, Loki’s bloodlust seems to make him the more righteous one, while Bartleby appears to just be along for the ride. In time, however, Bartleby is revealed to have a more deliberate axe to grind with the Almighty, putting him in the driver’s seat as Loki increasingly begins to doubt their plan. Both actors handle these complexities adeptly, with Affleck delivering a duplicitous intensity in Bartleby and Damon’s Loki always being sincere, if sometimes easily misled by his friend.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a Kevin Smith film, it’s the conversations between these two characters that scratch at something even deeper than the plot twists do. In their very first scene in a Wisconsin airport, Bartleby waxes intellectual about how the best of humanity can be found just outside an airport terminal, that the reunions with loved ones represents mankind’s clearest example of happiness.

A few scenes later, the two are on a bus talking about the nature of sin along with physical passion among married couples. While Bartleby ponders, “What incurs the Lord’s wrath these days?” Loki insists that the major sins, like adultery, never change. They then turn their attention to a couple passionately kissing on a train. While the guy in the couple is wearing a wedding ring, Loki is certain the woman isn’t his wife because “No married man kisses his wife like that.” Bartleby laughs this off but Loki does end up being correct.

Much further into the movie, when Bartleby decides he wants to kill Fiorentino’s character, he goes deep into his resentment of mankind and how God has always shown them “infinite fucking patience” while offering no such leniency for angels like them. Loki, meanwhile, is trying to talk Bartleby out of outright war with God.

Through these long, funny, philosophical conversations, you can feel the friendship between Affleck and Damon and, in that respect, Dogma even serves to complement their most important work up until this point, Good Will Hunting, which the pair had won the Oscar for writing just one year before Dogma.

Damon and Affleck met when they were just kids, just 10 and eight years old respectively. Their characters in Good Will Hunting had similarly grown up together, and the movie illustrates their brotherly bond. As for Dogma, while these characters are obviously far less autobiographical, the film’s dialogue-heavy scenes offer a look at what it might be like to sit at a bar with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as they’re locked into the kind of deep conversation between close friends who’ve had way too many beers.

Or more accurately, since this is a Kevin Smith movie we’re talking about, the kinds of conversations you’d have with an old friend after smoking way too much weed.