Droning funnyman Ben Stein monkeys around with evolution with the new documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they’re losing the “intelligent design” debate because of academic “prejudice.”
“Expelled” is a full-on, amply budgeted Michael Moore-styled mockery of evolution, a film that dresses creationist crackpottery in an “intelligent design” leisure suit and tries to make the fact that it’s not given credence in schools a matter of “academic freedom.”
Using loaded language and loaded imagery, Stein equates evolution with atheism, lays responsibility for the Holocaust at the feet of Charles Darwin, interviews and creatively edits biologists and others (scientists “cast” for their eccentric appearance) to make them look foolish for insisting that science, not religion, can explain creation.
Stein, a Nixon administration functionary who re-invented himself as a movie and TV buffoon after “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” seems closer to his latter persona in this disingenuous and dishonest documentary about something so silly you really wonder if he himself believes it.
Or is the former host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” just trying to add to Ben Stein’s money at the expense of the gullible?
Where’s your data, Ben? Got any? Any at all? Anyone else? “Expelled” relies on the viewer’s inability or unwillingness to wrestle with a complex corner of science, double-talking its way toward a “must be a miracle” solution to anything that science may not claim to have an answer for. Dismiss that for having no basis in fact, and you’re infringing on “academic freedom.”
“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”
PG for thematic material, some disturbing images and brief smoking. 1 hour, 30 minutes. Directed by Nathan Frankowski. With Ben Stein, Richard Dawkins, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler. Opens today at area theaters.
