Spoiler Warning:
"I'm Jay, and this is my silent hetero-life-mate Silent Bob."
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is a film that I desperately wanted to love. I would have taken liking it. But, this just isn’t it. It’s a dire attempt at a comedy from a filmmaker (who I love) that has not made a solid movie for a very long time now. This is the latest in a long line of sorry attempts to recapture the magic of Smith’s glory days. The truth is that this film is a rather sad compilation of bottom-of-the-barrel puns and references to actually well-executed 1990s texts like Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Dogma. I don’t know how the biggest Kevin Smith View Askewniverse fan can defend this heap of garbage.
I don’t really know where to begin here, other than pointing out that I’m not devastated that this was released. It hasn’t ruined Smith’s other movies for me, some of which do hold a special place in my heart. This feels like more of a catharsis for Smith himself by reinviting all of his famous friends to make weed jokes and crack wise about the 1990s after his major heart attack a few years ago. Good for him, and the best thing I can say is that one or two of those gags do land. I would argue that there’s only one fantastic scene in the entire film, featuring Ben Affleck, which has a couple of amusing lines and the smartest, most rewarding callbacks. Otherwise, this is a crash course in lazy writing.
I’m talking strictly comedy here, by the way. The plot is a total rehash of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which is pretty much the overarching joke of the entire film. Fair enough; it’s surface level, but this is intended to be a broad-strokes comedy. Why, then, are there beats for a laugh at the simple mention of the word Mallrats? Why is there an already outdated joke about The Shape of Water? What’s even going on here? It’s painful at times to see the man who wrote Clerks succumb to this level of writing. He replaces his dry, unwavering touch for sarcastic dialogue with a self-deprecating blandness that hundreds of people have written about him online already.
Beyond that, the comedy doesn’t even make sense much of the time. Jokes will swing from one topic to another and back again in the blink of an eye. Is it improv? Is it atrocious editing? I don’t think we’ll ever know. What I do know is that replacing Smith’s trademark obnoxious Star Wars references (which still filter through here) with a narcissistic indulgence on his own works misses so wide of the mark I cannot tell you. Add in an unhealthy dose of forced melodrama with a father-daughter relationship at the centre of the narrative, and et voila, you’ve got this mess.
The best compliment I have for Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is that it gets better as time goes on. The bar is low to start off with, no doubt, but the Affleck scene does add something that at least makes this worthwhile for major Kevin Smith fans. If you do not fall into that category, then avoid this like the plague. Not only will you not laugh, but you won’t even know what it is you’re meant to be laughing at. I wish there were more to it; I truly do. Anything Smith did in the 1990s is far more worthwhile than this. Snootchie bootchies.
Connor Clarke Film 