I was a massive Kevin Smith fan back in the 90's; wildly entertained by his salty dialogue, his geeky undercurrents heretofore unseen in the mainstream, and he had the first real sense of universe-building and shared continuity long before the MCU found success with it. But as I grew up as a movie viewer I found Smith didn't grow much as a filmmaker with me.
Stylistically, he's self-admittedly never been able to dazzle with the camera's lens. The deeper one goes into his repertoire, the more one wishes he still was beholden to the limitations he had with Clerks.
The man is a talker, as witnessed by his numerous speaking tours and his multitude of podcasts. Like many a geek, he likes to talk, opine, geek out and rant... the key distinguisher from, say, myself, is he actually takes the initiative to create as well, and had the gall to be a moderate success along the way. So his films reflect his verbosity, with the dialogue having always been the key draw.
But the juvenile sensibility to his dialogue -- extensive cursing, sexual innuendo, and pseudo-boundary pushing -- wore thin by the time of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Even more egregiously, like latter-day Simpsons, that film spent way too much time passing off self-reference as comedy.
Smith's career has been a see-saw since then. Red State showed improvement as a storyteller and a willingness to move beyond his standard tropes, while Clerks II (and even the maligned Jersey Girl) showed he had more on his mind as a writer. But then the atrocity of Cop Out and wildly unnecessary goof-em-up films like The Walrus and Yoga-Hosers seemed to undermine any sense of real auteurship, any sense of a place where he's not only comfortable operating in, but competent too.
These days he seems most at home in his podcast network, whil doing side jobs on the CW superhero shows like Flash and Supergirl put him in a machine that's too big for him to fail. So coming back to Jay and Silent Bob, particularly after the ugliness of the last movie they featured in, was not necessarily the most welcome news from Smith, and the parade of guest stars and names reprising past "View Askewniverse" characters announced made it sound like another tired retread of past glories.
The opening of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is a painful exercise in production company title card creep, followed by an opening sequence that screamed at me to immediately turn off the film and do something better with my time. Out front of the old Quick Stop location (an artificial but accurate recreation) it's immediately reliving old jokes, delivering a crudely juvenile "Cock Smoker" joke name for a chicken sandwich place (a brief moment later it revisits this joke and smugly takes time to have Craig Robinson and Joe Manganiello laugh at it), and Jay do his "Buffalo Bill" impression when he mistakes the police order to "put the plants down" to "put the pants down". This would have been pretty funny in Smith's second or third feature in the mid-90's but we're over a dozen features in and this is about as sophisticated that Smith's comedy seems to get.
The film spends the next 20 minutes revisiting old jokes, making painfully unfunny new jokes (puns and weed jokes mostly), and managed a parade of guest stars including Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Kate Micucci and Justin Long before it gets to the crux of what it wants to deal with: Jay learning he's the father of an 18 year old girl, and then coming to terms with it via a road trip that conveniently intersects with the otherwise rehashed plot of Jay and Silent Bob going to Hollywood to stop a reboot of Bluntman and Chronic.
The father-daughter road trip is full of inane turns (so much pot talk and guest appearances, and a couple go-nowhere complications like a menace-free encounter with the Klan) but it still has a tremendous amount of heart as Jay's paternal instincts, self-doubt and nervousness ground the film with some sense of reality and meaning.
The third act is a messy mixed-bag of this earnest - and welcome - sentimentality and a level of self-reference/fourth wall breaking that actually fatigued my eye-rolling muscles.
Conversely though, the cameos and trips down memory lane make much more sense at a convention, with Jay and SB running past the cast of Clerks (in black and white, a good gag but held on too long) or encountering Ben Affleck's Holden and Joey Lauren Adams' Alyssa from Chasing Amy to see where they are today and make some genuinely welcome (and meaningful) contributions to the plot while also serving as both a necessary critique of the film and a coda to it.
The big climax (snoogans) of the film is wacky surrealism, which the film otherwise does a decent job at staving off for most of its run (though it finds its way through here or there like creeping bellflower), but the sweet heart at the core of it makes it more palatable than it otherwise should be.
This is not a great film, but you can see the gestation in Smith's friendship with Jason Mewes, and Mewes newfound parentage providing inspiration for he script (his actual daughter appears in a prominent scene). It's somewhat familiar ground from Jersey Girl but its a logical happy place for Smith to operate in and show some maturity.
Harley Quinn Smith, as Jay's daughter, Millennium Falcon, Treshelle Edmond and AP Bio's Aparna Brielle provide some distinctly feminine energy and youthful vigor to an otherwise (acknowledged) dated pairing. Of the guest spots aplenty, Chris Hemsworth comes out on top ("It's Hems-worth it"), with Method Man, Redman, Affleck, Adams and Rosario Dawson following close behind.
Not the exact waste of time I was expecting. Strangely, as a lapsed Kevin Smith fan, it felt like closure I didn't know I needed.
Jay named his daughter Millenium Falcon? Or her mother did?
ReplyDeleteThe mother did. Shannon Elizabeth, reprising her role from J&SBSB, married someone with the last name "Falcon" and named her "Millennium" because she was born in 2001 I guess.
Delete