Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed * *

Directed by Nathan Frankowski. With Ben Stein, Richard Dawkins, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler. Distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures. 1 hour, 30 mins. PG (adult themes, disturbing images and brief smoking). Playing at: area theaters.

Droning funnyman Ben Stein monkeys around with evolution with the 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-style 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 and Co. (Nathan Frankowski is the credited director) equate evolution with atheism, lay responsibility for the Holocaust at the feet of Charles Darwin, interview and creatively edit biologists and others (scientists "cast" for their eccentric appearance) to make them look foolish for insisting that science, not religion, can explain creation.

Stein and friends use animation (shades of Bowling for Columbine), amusing chunks of B-movies, and even The Wizard of Oz and classic propaganda techniques to undercut 150 years of peer-tested research. Their goal? Create just a sliver of doubt about evolution.

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 might not claim to have an answer for. When academe, the courts, the opinions of the educated have already weighed in on the "other side," who's the real monkey in this "debate"? - Roger Moore,
The Orlando Sentinel