i wish more films would take on issues of faith and morality in the modern world .
and i wish that film - makers would use commandments as a blueprint on how _ not _ to do it .
writer / director daniel taplitz has created a bizarre conglomeration of satire and soul - searching in this tale of seth warner ( aidan quinn ) , a man of faith who runs into a streak of bad luck which usually inspires country - western lyrics : his pregnant wife drowns , his home is destroyed by a tornado , he loses his job and his dog is crippled by a bolt of lightning .
convinced that god has broken his half of the covenant , seth decides to break his , and sets out to turn every " thou shalt not " of the ten commandments into a " thou shalt " ( and vice versa ) .
his wife 's sister rachel ( " friends " ' courteney cox ) wants to help seth ; rachel 's selfish husband harry ( anthony lapaglia ) , who tends to break a few commandments of his own , thinks seth is a lunatic .
thus begins a film which picks the wrong tone for every occasion .
taplitz is n't interested in treating seth 's tragedies as genuinely tragic , making it impossible to sympathize with him .
composer joseph vitarelli provides a score full of whimsical woodwinds , turning seth 's sacrilegious mission into an amusing lark ; quinn 's performance as seth is all wild - eyed fervor without any genuine pain .
the actual breaking of the commandments is almost treated as an afterthought , with one through five dispatched in a five - minute montage .
the result is a character whose actions feel less like the authentic responses of an anguished man than the machinations of a high - concept movie plot .
it 's not even entirely clear that commandments is about seth .
corporate attorney rachel is given a case which is supposed to soften a hard heart we see no indication she has , while harry gets his comeuppance as part of seth 's " false witness .
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only courteney cox strikes a note of reality in a solid performance ; she is sane center around which too equally troubled men revolve .
even she ca n't force taplitz to decide whose story this is , or what we should have learned about dealing with the struggles in our lives and our relationship with the infinite .
by the time seth makes a singularly biblical reappearance late in the film , it has become clear that taplitz is aiming for a fantastical fable which makes no connection with real human experience .
commandments is a bad comedy which could have been a decent drama if daniel taplitz had had the guts to take faith -- and the loss thereof -- at all seriously .
has created a bizarre conglomeration of satire and soul - searching picks the wrong tone for every occasion a score full of whimsical woodwinds , turning seth 's sacrilegious mission into an amusing lark a fantastical fable which makes no connection with real human experience the result is a character whose actions feel less like the authentic responses of an anguished man than the machinations of a high - concept movie plot a bad comedy