Thou shalt not squander so much talent

"The Ten" has a catchy concept: 10 short satiric stories, each focusing on one of the Ten Commandments. It has a high-profile young cast: Paul Rudd, Winona Ryder, Gretchen Mol, Jessica Alba, and Liev Schreiber are among the glamorous talents herein assembled.

All that's missing are the laughs. Any laughs. Co-written and directed by David Wain, a member of the putative comedy troupe Stella and director of the actually quite funny "Wet Hot American Summer" (2001), "The Ten" is a virtually snicker-free exercise in audience pain. It's less a movie than an endurance test.

The problem lies in the approach: Each commandment is "illustrated" by an absurdist comic situation that relates to it only tangentially before going further off the rails. "Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me" concerns a young man (Adam Brody) who becomes a celebrity after a sky-diving accident leaves him forever embedded in the ground; the sequence falls apart into sub-Python newscaster bickering.

"Thou Shalt Not Murder" features a slick surgeon (co-writer Ken Marino) who leaves medical instruments inside a patient "as a goof," and that's pretty much the joke. "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Goods" is about a contest between two suburbanites (Schreiber and Joe Lo Truglio) to see who can amass the most CAT-scan machines. "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife" is a thwarted prison romance between the jailed surgeon and a fellow inmate (Rob Corddry of "The Daily Show").

The only segments that force a smile are "Thou Shalt Not Take the Lord's Name in Vain," in which a virginal librarian (Mol) meets and falls for a hunky, shirtless Jesus Christ (Justin Theroux) during a Mexican vacation, and "Thou Shalt Not Steal," which gives Ryder an outrageously athletic sex scene with a ventriloquist's dummy. They're as smug and airless as the rest, but at least they're allowed to expand on their premises before the ADD filmmaking turns helplessly elsewhere.

Linking these skits is an even less funny story line involving a boorish narrator (Rudd) torn between his beautiful shrew of a wife (Famke Janssen) and clingy mistress (Alba). The stale fear-of-women humor might be bearable if the script weren't so relentlessly witless. "Do you know what 'The Ten' is?" asks Rudd rhetorically at one point, before continuing, " 'Ten'-is? Tennis? Tennis, anyone?"

Anyone and anything but this.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.