In a sentenceKevin Smith answers his internet critics at feature length, with an orangutan, and the orangutan has the better timing
New Jersey. Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) deal outside the Quick Stop until the clerks Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) have them served with a restraining order. At the comic shop, Brodie Bruce (Jason Lee) tells them that Bluntman and Chronic, the comic drawn in their likeness, is being made into a Hollywood film. Its creator Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) admits he sold the rights and shows them the internet, where strangers are calling them names. Jay decides the film must be stopped, and the pair hitch west, falling in with four women in a van, Justice (Shannon Elizabeth), Sissy (Eliza Dushku), Chrissy (Ali Larter) and Missy (Jennifer Schwalbach Smith), who have plans of their own.
Kevin Smith’s send-off for Jay and Silent Bob is a road trip built from grudges, cameos and jokes about the internet. Once it reaches Hollywood it is often funny, and the hour it takes to get there is a slog the faithful will forgive.
Kevin Smith writes, directs and co-edits a 104-minute road comedy that is, by its own account, a send-off for the two men who have stood outside the Quick Stop since Clerks in 1994. The plot is a pretext. Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) learn that Hollywood is filming the comic drawn in their likeness, read some unkind things about themselves on the internet, and set off west to stop it. What Smith is attempting is a cheerful, filthy lap of honour, with every face from his earlier films waving from the kerb. What he has made is a film with a funny last half hour and a long drive to get there.
The jokes land when they are about something Smith knows, and what he knows is the film business. Chris Rock’s Chaka Luther King, a director who has decided the production is a racist plot against him and will not let the absence of evidence spoil it, is the best thing here. Ben Affleck appears twice, once as Holden McNeil from Chasing Amy and once as himself on a studio lot, discussing his own career with a candour braver than it looks. Jason Lee doubles as Brodie Bruce and Banky Edwards and finds a different smugness for each. Will Ferrell’s Federal Wildlife Marshal Willenholly has a badge and no powers, and Ferrell plays him as a man who knows it and hopes nobody else does.
We laughed out loud, more than once, in the studio stretch, and then felt faintly cheap about it, because the joke each time was that the industry paying for the film is run by fools, and we were being asked to agree from the safety of our seats. Mewes is the reason it works regardless. He plays Jay with such complete, witless conviction that Smith’s grievances come out of his mouth sounding like appetite rather than a list of complaints.
The hour before Hollywood is the trouble. Jamie Anderson shoots in bright, flat light with the camera at head height, waiting for the dialogue, which is how Smith’s films have always looked and which here shows how little is happening in front of it. The four women in the van, Justice (Shannon Elizabeth), Sissy (Eliza Dushku), Chrissy (Ali Larter) and Missy (Jennifer Schwalbach Smith), are a thin joke stretched over the middle of the film: jewel thieves in Isis Mussenden’s black catsuits, running a heist picture past the two dimmest men in New Jersey. Elizabeth is asked to fall for Jay and comes close to making it look like a decision. The heist itself runs long and has perhaps three jokes in it, and one of those belongs to an orangutan.
Scott Mosier and Smith cut the film as a chain of sketches, each announced by a famous face and dropped the moment the face leaves. James L. Venable’s score does the work of pretending something is at stake, all brass and hurrying strings over scenes of two men walking along a road. Robert Holtzman’s production design has the right idea once the film reaches the lot, where the studio is plywood frontage with nothing behind it. That is as close to a point as the film gets, and Smith does not stay on it for long.
Clerks and Chasing Amy were about people. This one is about Smith, and about what strangers wrote about Smith on message boards. Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson open the film as Dante Hicks and Randal Graves, serving a restraining order, and the scene is a reminder of how well Smith once wrote men who hated their jobs. He had not lost the knack. He had found something he would rather do with it, which was answer his post.
Most critics split roughly where we have, between those who arrived as fans and those who did not, and that is still the only reliable test. If Jay dancing outside a convenience store is already your idea of an evening, there is a good hour in here, with Rock and Ferrell doing more than they were paid for. If it is not, the 18 certificate and the 104 minutes are both earned, and only one of them is a reason to stay.
The reviews lean mixed, with most critics landing somewhere between amused and worn down. Where there is praise it goes to the Hollywood parodies and to the supporting players: Chris Rock’s furious director and Jason Lee’s scene-stealing turns come up more than once, and Will Ferrell is singled out as the one actor adding something to a deliberately dumb comedy. Several reviewers admit to laughing, and nearly all agree the film works best for people who already know Kevin Smith’s earlier films.
The reservations cluster around self-indulgence. The insider jokes about Miramax, the scatological business and a shapeless plot are the recurring complaints, and the spread is wide. Den of Geek and Eye for Film treat it as mindless fun, while Variety calls it a squandered setback, The Guardian finds it crude with little comic payoff, and The AV Club points to a long, leaden heist subplot as the place where the film stalls. Empire speaks for the middle: infuriatingly uneven, sharp one minute and mirthless the next.
The page is identified as a film review, but its text is inaccessible, so the critic’s verdict cannot be established. No specific praise or complaint can be verified from the available page.
Read the full review →The accessible page does not reveal the critic’s verdict. It provides no praise or complaint beyond the film’s premise.
Read the full review →The review sees the film as an indulgent, dim-witted road-trip comedy rather than a successful return to Smith’s slacker universe. It singles out the pair’s scatological antics as a weakness.
Read the full review →The review finds the comedy enjoyable overall, though uneven and most rewarding for Kevin Smith fans. It praises the Hollywood parodies while criticizing the film’s patchiness and reliance on insider references.
Read the full review →Smith finds the film infuriatingly uneven, with jokes that sometimes land brilliantly and sometimes fall flat. He praises Jay’s tree-dweller rant and Chris Rock’s angry director, while criticizing the weak plot and mirthless stretches.
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