by MATTHEW HAYS

You really want to love a film like Saved!, a movie clearly made with the best of intentions. With Clueless bravado, the filmmakers set out to skewer the nasty and conformist attitudes of a bunch of rather snotty, plotting kids at a Christian high school. The results are like Christian summer camp I once attended: there were fun bits, but the preachiness of it all rather brought the overall effect down a notch or two.

Jena Malone plays Mary, a happy-go-lucky Christian teen who learns early on that her boyfriend is gay. Desperate to save him, Malone mounts him and convinces him that he is indeed straight. They work on their act, but no such success. Dear boyfriend is caught with a fella and shipped off to hetero boot camp. Malone then finds that once is enough: she's pregnant, and this leads her to question the pecking order that makes up her school's rather dreadful social set-up. Mandy Moore does well as the perfect and perfectly judgemental bitch, the teen queen who controls and manipulates all around her. She holds prayer sessions at her home, eyes various boys and gives the only Jew enrolled at the school a hard time.

At its best, Saved! is a hoot to watch. The cast - including Patrick Fugit, Eva Amurri, Welcome to the Dollhouse's Heather Matarazzo and Macaulay Culkin, who here plays wheelchair bound - are excellent, clearly relishing their chances to breathe life into various iconic teen movie stereotypes.

It's an important message - one about the hypocrisy of Christians who talk about love while remaining ultimately bigoted on the gay issue, steeped in homophobia - though I sincerely doubt the Passion of the Christ crowd will be moved to rush to the cinemas to see this film.

But if this is, as we are being told, a message movie, Saved! becomes far more problematic when one considers its accompanying isn't-teen-pregnancy-fun motif. Given how much of a problem that is for young people, that glib treatment of the issue kind of undermines the entire affair.

Saved! opens Friday, June 11

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