General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Ten

The Ten is a 2007 American comedy anthology film directed by David Wain and co-written by Wain and Ken Marino, in which ten short stories, each loosely inspired by one of the Ten Commandments, are presented with overlapping characters and recurring comic motifs.¹^•² It was distributed by THINKFilm, opened in limited release on August 3, 2007, runs 95 minutes, and is rated R.²

Key fact	Detail
Directors and writers	Directed by David Wain; written by Wain and Ken Marino¹
Structure	Ten stories, each based on one of the Ten Commandments, tied together by a narrator with his own moral problems³
Release	THINKFilm; limited theatrical release August 3, 2007; 95 minutes; rated R²
Budget	$3.5 million, financed by investors, against roughly $60 million for a comparable Hollywood comedy⁴
Box office	$769,726 domestic, $785,528 worldwide; widest release 47 theaters⁵
Critical reception	35% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 82 reviews; a Metascore of 50 (mixed or average)²^•⁶
Principal cast	Paul Rudd, Winona Ryder, Jessica Alba, Adam Brody, Ken Marino, Famke Janssen, Justin Theroux, Gretchen Mol, Liev Schreiber, Rob Corddry, Bobby Cannavale, Oliver Platt¹

Spoilers

Premise and structure

The film presents ten comic vignettes, each attached to one of the biblical commandments, with characters and themes that overlap across segments.³ Paul Rudd serves as host, appearing on a black soundstage adorned with giant computer-generated tablets of stone; his character, Jeff Reigert, introduces the stories while also starring in a tale of adultery, and the framing narrative eventually folds him and Famke Janssen's character into the main body of the film.⁷^•⁸

Several segments received particular attention from critics. In the first story, a skydiver played by Adam Brody forgets his parachute, survives his landing embedded in the ground, and becomes a celebrity phenomenon, illustrating "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me."²^•⁷ Ken Marino plays a surgeon obsessed with pranks who leaves a scalpel inside a patient, killing her, and repeatedly explains that it was "just a goof."²^•⁷ Gretchen Mol plays a 35-year-old virgin whose Mexican vacation romance with a hunky carpenter named Jesus Christ, played by Justin Theroux, illustrates "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain."⁶ Winona Ryder appears in the "Thou shalt not steal" segment, in which her character begins a relationship with a ventriloquist's dummy.²^•⁷ One segment, "Thou shall not tell a lie," was realized as an animated piece titled Lying Rhino, created by Augenblick Studios under animation director Aaron Augenblick.⁹

Wain described the commandments as a structural device rather than a moral argument. He told the New York Observer that the filmmakers "just thought the Ten Commandments were a great thing to hang a bunch of stories on," and said the film was far from a commentary on the role of religion in the world.¹⁰ In a 2007 interview he said that he and Marino "got together and plotted to write something that was funny and silly and had no huge point," and that the commandments offered a good structure for that.¹¹

Production

Wain said the project took "like a nine or ten year process" from conception to screen.¹² For the writing itself, he drew on a file of ideas he had randomly written down over the preceding ten years.¹³ The film was made independently, without a major studio: Wain contrasted its $3.5 million investor-financed budget with the roughly $60 million cost of a Hollywood comedy like Step Brothers, and with the $1 million budget of his earlier Wet Hot American Summer.⁴

The cast drew heavily on Wain's circle. Wain and Marino came out of The State, an early-1990s MTV sketch comedy troupe with 18 members, many of whom appear in the film alongside screen actors such as Jessica Alba and Liev Schreiber.⁷^•⁴

Reception

Critical response was mixed and divided. The film scored 35% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, with a critics consensus that the uneven and random tone caused it to fall apart despite some humorous sketches.² On Metacritic it received a Metascore of 50, with 7 positive, 11 mixed, and 4 negative reviews among 22 counted.⁶ Reviewers who responded positively included Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, who called it "devious and inspired enough to juice you past any weak spots," and Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club, who found the early skits explosively funny and predicted cult fame for the project.⁶ Time Out gave it 3 out of 5 stars, judging that some of the minimovies were sharper than others and that a few performers were not quite clued in.¹

Commercially, the film earned $121,374 in its opening weekend in 25 theaters and ran through October 4, 2007, finishing with $769,726 domestically and $785,528 worldwide.⁵

Comparison with The Decalogue

Several critics compared the film to The Decalogue (Dekalog), the 1989 ten-part Polish television series by Krzysztof Kieślowski that addressed the commandments in as many episodes.⁸ The Santa Barbara Independent framed The Ten as "something similar, but completely different" from Kieślowski's considered masterpiece.⁸ The critic Nick Schager, writing in Slant Magazine, called the two works tonally divergent but noted shared parallels, including a belief in the commandments as bedrocks of human experience and in their interconnected relationship to one another.⁷ A review at NotComing.com argued that both works consider the iterative nature of the commandments, which must be taken as a whole with their individual components clarifying each other.¹⁴ A theological survey likewise groups the two, noting that both use the Ten Commandments as a structure for ten smaller stories.¹⁵

Aftermath

Wain followed the film with Role Models, his first big studio movie, co-written with Marino and Paul Rudd for Universal; he described that project as a mainstream comedy told through a David Wain lens.⁴^•¹⁶ In a later interview he counted the collaborative writing retreat that produced The Ten as the first of three such sessions, the second producing Wanderlust.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2007 to 2008 › Released in 2007

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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