Holy Fuck Is Jay & Silent Bob Strikes Back Ever Self-Indulgent!
Though he rose to fame as Silent Bob, a man who (almost) never speaks, Kevin Smith’s art form has always been talking and being himself. That makes him perfect for the medium of podcasting, where dudes (and much less frequently ladies) hang out and shoot the breeze about whatever. It's Smith’s longtime specialty, his superpower, as it were.
Smith is a podcasting mogul with a lucrative sideline in books and comic books and comic book stores and reality shows about comic book stores and speaking engagements, where, again, Smith is free to kibitz in a free-form fashion, which has always been his greatest, truest talent.
Unsurprisingly, filmmaking has seemingly taken a backseat in Smith’s life and career to Smith’s main gig: being Kevin Smith. Smith’s Great White North trilogy, a planned trio of Canadian set and themed horror films that still feels more like the consequence of the filmmaker losing a weird bet than a series of films that Smith wanted to make of his own accord, gave us a singularly self-indulgent, unsatisfying entry in 2016’s Yoga Hosers, a Canadian Clerks riff starring Smith’s daughter, Johnny Depp’s daughter, Johnny Depp and “Bratzis”, one foot tall Nazis made out of bratwursts.
Yoga Hosers set a new standard for juvenile self-indulgence for a filmmaker whose trademark has always been juvenile self-indulgence that might just be topped by Smith’s next cinematic endeavor, Jay & Silent Bob Reboot. Reboot gives us the remake/reboot/sequel to 2001’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back that only Smith’s most pathologically devoted cultists have asked for.
2001’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back is not the worst movie ever made. But it could very well be the least essential. In the dawn of the new millennium Smith essentially decided to make the worst’s most expensive fan film, a modestly budgeted tribute to the films and world of New Jersey born-and-bred auteur Kevin Smith.
Riding the tail end of the gross-out comedy wave that kicked off with 1998’s There’s Something About Mary and launched into high gear with the following year’s blockbuster Austin Powers: The Spy That Shagged Me, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back set out to satiate the public’s seemingly bottomless appetite for the moderately popular stoner characters Smith and pal Jason Mewes played to cult fame in Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma.
In Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back the idiot drug dealers Smith and Mewes play discover that Hollywood is making a movie based on Bluntman & Chronic, marijuana-themed superheroes based on the personalities of Jay and Silent Bob that feature prominently in Chasing Amy. The internet being the sordid, fetid sewer that it is, and was, this upcoming Miramax motion picture is already attracting nasty comments at an Ain’t It Cool-like movie news and gossip site called Movie Poop Shoot. In an exceedingly stupid, related development, Kevin Smith actually started a website called Movie Poop Shoot because the world is a very silly place.
Jay and Silent Bob are worried that nerds on the internet will ruin their good name and honorable reputations and make a laughingstock of them. So they leave their home turf in New Jersey and set off on a cross-country expedition to Hollywood to keep the movie from getting made.
What follows is a trek across our nation so endless and devoid of laughter that it seems to take place in real time over a period of months and not 104 excruciatingly long, shapeless, rambling minutes.
En route the hapless duo encounter a quartet of sexy bad girls played by Ali Larter, Shannon Elizabeth, Eliza Dushku and Jennifer Schwalbach (the future Mrs. Kevin Smith), as an evil version of Charlie’s Angels, daring international jewel thieves pretending to be radical animal activists. They’re one-dimensional sex bombs in skin-tight latex, leering adolescent fantasies onscreen solely to provide eye candy and a brief reprieve from the wall-to-wall gay panic jokes. Smith gives them nothing more to play beyond “sexy.” Elizabeth has either the best of it or the worst of it in that she plays what passes as the female lead and subsequently has the extraordinary acting challenge of having to convincingly express sexual attraction and erotic desire for the character of Jay. I’m not sure any actress is up to that challenge. Elizabeth certainly is not.
Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back is less an unusually slapdash, asinine road comedy/show-business satire than the least merited film-length victory lap in motion picture history. It’s essentially Easter Egg: The Movie, a never-ending stream of winking, loving references to every movie Smith had made up until that point, which means Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma. Smith had made movies of varying degrees of ambition and achievement and now was content to glory in the ramshackle but strangely lovable world that he had created.
When Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back wants to really drive home for the idiots in the audience that its characters are making an outrageous inside joke about the movie they’re in, or the View Askew epics that led up to it, which is often, they will very subtly have a character, or series of characters look directly at the camera for an extended period of time.
When a character played by Ben Affleck delivers the obnoxiously on-the-nose line, “A Jay and Silent Bob movie? Who would pay to see that?”, for example, Smith, Mewes and Affleck all turn to the camera with an almost “dramatic squirrel” sense of melodrama AND Smith corpses, devolving into helpless laughter at the just-barely-a-joke he put in Affleck’s mouth.
Considering that, as we have established, Smith has become rich and famous for talking, something he does very well, and writing, something he does less well, it’s ironic that Smith really lucks out here by playing a character whose silence liberates him from having to deliver Kevin Smith dialogue. While everyone else competes furiously and fruitlessly in the film’s Profanity Olympics, Smith steals the film with his genial Jersey Harpo Marx routine, expressive face and flair for good-natured physical comedy. In a movie defined by rancid, profane banter, Smith has written himself the plum part of the man who gets to shut up.
Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back gives an overgrown kid from New Jersey everything he could possibly want when making the ultimate stoner slacker sex comedy extravaganza. It’s got sexy, dangerous babes in latex flipping about acrobatically. It’s got stoner morons for heroes. It has Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia and cameos from George Carlin and Jon Stewart and Chris Rock and Will Ferrell before he was Will Ferrell. It’s got all the famous people from TV and movies making fun of all the TV and movies that we know them from, like Dawson from that show Dawson’s Creek. It’s got Morris Day AND The Time. It’s got parodies of pop culture phenomenon like Scream and The Fugitive. It has the Scooby gang and the Mystery van and Scooby-Doo getting high off some dooby snacks. It even has a freaking orangutan for Jay and Silent Bob to clown around with, and integrate into their gay panic-fueled antics, like when they convince law enforcement that they’re a gay couple and the primate is their child.
Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back consequently offers Smith and co-editor Scott Mosier some formidable editing challenges: How do you decide what to cut when nothing you’ve filmed deserves to be in a movie, when it all screams “cutting room floor” or “deleted scenes?”
Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back is overflowing with almost suspiciously timely elements. It’s a ramshackle comedy about nerd rage over superhero movie casting and the toxic ugliness of the internet, comic books, superheroes, geeks, Star Wars and the mainstreaming of marijuana and marijuana culture.
Yet Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back has almost impressively little to say about any of that because it is monomaniacally focused on exploring and exploiting what it sees as the bottomless comic gold of straight dudes being confronted with the specter of homosexual sex. There’s something weirdly poignant about Kevin Smith being able to work with towering legends of his youth like George Carlin, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill and having nothing better to offer them than flailing sex gags rooted in the sweaty, insecure and ultimately barren field of gay panic jokes.
At a Comic-Con Q&A, Smith humble-bragged that Jay & Silent Bob Reboot was "literally the same f**king movie (as 2001’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back) all over again.” He clearly meant that in a positive way but it comes off as more of a threat. A film vehicle for Jay and Silent Bob never should have been made in the first place, which is a huge part of the unfunny inside joke that is Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. It most assuredly does not deserve to be made a second time.
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