The notoriety surrounding this Ben Affleck/Matt Damon–produced flick was bound to eclipse its merits. Best known as the winner of Project Greenlight, the contest sponsored by the Cambridge power duo that awarded a movie deal to the best screenplay, Pete Jones’s film has also been the subject of an HBO reality-TV show that chronicled the buffoonish melodramatics behind the filmmaking process.

The fruit of all this hoopla proves to be a hodge-podge of religious stereotypes centered on an eight-year-old Chicago boy (the wide-eyed Adiel Stein) who in the summer of ’76 grapples with the differences between Catholicism and Judaism. His father (Aidan Quinn) is an Irish Catholic firefighter who believes in beer but not birth control — he’s got eight kids he can barely afford. On the other side of the religious divide is an amicable rabbi (Kevin Pollak) whose only son is afflicted by leukemia. The two kids unite, concoct a "worthy of Jesus decathlon," and dance theological circles around the narrow-minded adults. Jones has the sincerity of innocence, but Summer plays like a manipulative After School Special — you can see the moral lesson a mile away.