The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002)

Movies in which Catholic teenagers rebel against the orthodoxy of parochial school tend to play by their own strict rules. They celebrate the rituals of adolescent naughtiness -- drinking! copping a feel! ridiculing the nuns! -- while taking the moral measure of that very same bad behavior. Set in the 1970s, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys tries to establish a casually organic, stand-by-me flow, even as it turns the adventures of two high school friends, precocious heartthrob Francis (Emile Hirsch) and bratty daredevil Tim (Kieran Culkin), into lumbering parables of lost innocence.

Based on a novel by Chris Fuhrman, who died in 1991, the movie is an overstuffed compendium of teen-Catholic-movie dogma. We get Jodie Foster overacting as a one-legged nun, a tender courtship that dances around a Sinful Secret, and an ultimately disastrous prank to spring a cougar from the local zoo. It's all way too heavy-handed, though nicely acted by Hirsch, Culkin, and, especially, Jena Malone. In an innovative twist, the kids' comic-book fantasies come to life in animated sequences (drawn by ''Spawn'''s Todd McFarlane) that are like the Bible gone madly Marvel.

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