Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
Rated R for pervasive strong crude sexual content, language throughout, drug use and some nudity
Score: 3 out of 5
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is a movie that shouldn't work nearly as well as it does. The plot is pure farce, the jokes sometimes -- okay, frequently -- violate all lines of good taste, and it begs comparison to the other films in writer/director Kevin Smith's "View Askewniverse", most notably his groundbreaking debut Clerks and...
...hey, haven't I written this review before?
As a matter of fact, I have! I will happily admit to being a fan of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the 2001 comedy to which this film serves as both a sequel and a loose remake. As tasteless as it was, it makes for an excellent nostalgia trip for '90s kids to this day, and with last year marking the 25th anniversary of Clerks, a new film set in Smith's universe of Jersey potheads, Mooby's, arguments over arcane geek references, and Alanis Morissette as God was to be expected. And if you're already a fan, then Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is pretty much exactly the kind of movie you could've asked for to mark the occasion. It's at its best when it's poking fun at all the ways in which the world has changed since 2001, from new technology to geek culture to Smith's own career, and while some of the running gags could get tiresome, the characters were still very fun to revisit after so long, and one of the more critical differences here does elevate it some. It's pure fanservice, nothing more and nothing less, and its effect is blunted if you're not already a fan, but I can't deny that it worked as such.
The plot once more, obviously, concerns Jay and Silent Bob, who, thanks to some mishaps involving their illegal pot dispensary and Justin Long's Hollywood lawyer Brandon, find out that they can no longer legally call themselves "Jay and Silent Bob". That's because Saban Films has bought the rights to Bluntman & Chronic, the indie superhero comic book that got turned into a movie back in 2001, in order to start working on a reboot titled Bluntman v Chronic starring Val Kilmer and Melissa Benoist and directed by Kevin Smith, that sellout Hollywood hack responsible for Tusk. Seeking to get their names back, Jay and Silent Bob set out once more on a trek from New Jersey to Hollywood in order to sabotage the movie. Along the way, they run into Justice Faulken, the former jewel thief who Jay had a brief fling with, and find out that she has a daughter, Millennium "Milly" Faulken, who also wants to go to Hollywood for the annual Chronic-Con with her conspicuously diverse group of friends. As a result, in addition to stopping Bluntman v Chronic from getting made, Jay also has to contend with the daughter he never knew he had, who doesn't yet know that this weird, middle-aged pothead is in fact her father.
The interactions between Jay and Milly give this film an emotional core that its predecessor, with its focus on rapid-fire laughs and raunchy humor, lacked. It's clear that Smith was writing this from a fairly personal place, and not just in the fact that he cast his real daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, as Milly (this isn't the first film he cast her in). At its heart, this is a movie about a deadbeat dad trying to reconcile with a daughter he never knew, and make up for the fact that he had never been present in her life. Jason Mewes got a bit more to do as Jay this time than just play the potheaded comic relief; while his character is still very much that, no doubt about it, he also has an excellent rapport with Harley's Milly that's as fun to watch as his old relationship with Silent Bob. The scenes of Jay and Milly had a sincerity to them that you wouldn't normally expect from a willfully low-brow stoner comedy like this, with neither of them portrayed as idealized but both of them still fundamentally good people who deserve to get to know each other better. The passion in their relationship was visible and palatable, and watching the two of them together was one of the best parts of the film.
Of course, this is still a Jay and Silent Bob movie first and foremost, and if you're a fan of Smith's mix of pop culture/geek humor, marijuana, and gross-out gags, you will enjoy this. I watched this with my mom, and she was laughing her ass off throughout. A lot of the jokes felt a bit tamer than before; when it comes to raunchiness, this film has nothing on the "rules of the road" from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the Golgothan from Dogma, or "Kinky Kelly" from Clerks II, perhaps a function of Smith now being a bit older. Instead, this film leans a bit more on the pop culture side of the equation, especially in how it mines its laughs from how much life has changed since 2001, especially with regards to the film industry that both Strike Back and this film lampooned. Geek culture has become big business, with Bluntman & Chronic now the subject of a massive fan convention in Los Angeles that serves as an extended piss-take on the marriage between what had once been a niche fandom and the Hollywood machine. That said, some things never change, and Hollywood is still relying on recycled old properties to make its bank, even if the films they make may feel misguided from the start (we see a clip of Bluntman v Chronic, and it somehow looks even worse than the last one). This isn't a necessarily deep satire of such, but as somebody who got a lot of what this film was making fun of, there were moments when I was laughing harder than my mom was. Speaking of geek stuff, the film is also jam-packed with fanservice and Easter eggs for longtime fans of the View Askewniverse, with plenty of actors from prior films making welcome cameos, with one in particular towards the end making for a great bookend for Chasing Amy. (I've said in the past that, had Shannon Elizabeth not been typecast as "the hot chick", she would've made a great comedic leading lady, and I stand by it.)
Not all the humor worked, though. The running gags fell flat as often as they landed, and at times I groaned as an obvious dumb joke started to creep my way. A brief scene involving Milly and her friends being captured by Klansmen (led by WWE wrestler Chris Jericho) and Jay and Silent Bob rescuing them also brought the story to a halt and wasn't quite as funny as it thought it was, barely doing anything interesting beyond one admittedly elaborate gross-out. On that note, Milly's friends weren't a particularly memorable presence. Only one of them, the Chinese exchange student Shan Yu, got anything interesting to do beyond hang around and react to Jay and Silent Bob, and what she does only happens towards the end. It felt like an attempt to replicate Justice's heist crew from Strike Back mixed with an attempt to poke fun at Hollywood's ham-handed efforts at "representation" that often amount to tokenism at best, one that not only missed the mark but often seemed to fall victim to the very things that it was trying to satirize. I liked the actors well enough, but narrowing the three of them down to just one (possibly Soapy, Milly's deaf best friend) would've worked a lot better -- not least of all because Milly and Soapy still would've worked as a "next-generation Jay and Silent Bob", keeping with the film's overall theme of sending up reboots.
...hey, haven't I written this review before?
As a matter of fact, I have! I will happily admit to being a fan of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the 2001 comedy to which this film serves as both a sequel and a loose remake. As tasteless as it was, it makes for an excellent nostalgia trip for '90s kids to this day, and with last year marking the 25th anniversary of Clerks, a new film set in Smith's universe of Jersey potheads, Mooby's, arguments over arcane geek references, and Alanis Morissette as God was to be expected. And if you're already a fan, then Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is pretty much exactly the kind of movie you could've asked for to mark the occasion. It's at its best when it's poking fun at all the ways in which the world has changed since 2001, from new technology to geek culture to Smith's own career, and while some of the running gags could get tiresome, the characters were still very fun to revisit after so long, and one of the more critical differences here does elevate it some. It's pure fanservice, nothing more and nothing less, and its effect is blunted if you're not already a fan, but I can't deny that it worked as such.
The plot once more, obviously, concerns Jay and Silent Bob, who, thanks to some mishaps involving their illegal pot dispensary and Justin Long's Hollywood lawyer Brandon, find out that they can no longer legally call themselves "Jay and Silent Bob". That's because Saban Films has bought the rights to Bluntman & Chronic, the indie superhero comic book that got turned into a movie back in 2001, in order to start working on a reboot titled Bluntman v Chronic starring Val Kilmer and Melissa Benoist and directed by Kevin Smith, that sellout Hollywood hack responsible for Tusk. Seeking to get their names back, Jay and Silent Bob set out once more on a trek from New Jersey to Hollywood in order to sabotage the movie. Along the way, they run into Justice Faulken, the former jewel thief who Jay had a brief fling with, and find out that she has a daughter, Millennium "Milly" Faulken, who also wants to go to Hollywood for the annual Chronic-Con with her conspicuously diverse group of friends. As a result, in addition to stopping Bluntman v Chronic from getting made, Jay also has to contend with the daughter he never knew he had, who doesn't yet know that this weird, middle-aged pothead is in fact her father.
The interactions between Jay and Milly give this film an emotional core that its predecessor, with its focus on rapid-fire laughs and raunchy humor, lacked. It's clear that Smith was writing this from a fairly personal place, and not just in the fact that he cast his real daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, as Milly (this isn't the first film he cast her in). At its heart, this is a movie about a deadbeat dad trying to reconcile with a daughter he never knew, and make up for the fact that he had never been present in her life. Jason Mewes got a bit more to do as Jay this time than just play the potheaded comic relief; while his character is still very much that, no doubt about it, he also has an excellent rapport with Harley's Milly that's as fun to watch as his old relationship with Silent Bob. The scenes of Jay and Milly had a sincerity to them that you wouldn't normally expect from a willfully low-brow stoner comedy like this, with neither of them portrayed as idealized but both of them still fundamentally good people who deserve to get to know each other better. The passion in their relationship was visible and palatable, and watching the two of them together was one of the best parts of the film.
Of course, this is still a Jay and Silent Bob movie first and foremost, and if you're a fan of Smith's mix of pop culture/geek humor, marijuana, and gross-out gags, you will enjoy this. I watched this with my mom, and she was laughing her ass off throughout. A lot of the jokes felt a bit tamer than before; when it comes to raunchiness, this film has nothing on the "rules of the road" from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the Golgothan from Dogma, or "Kinky Kelly" from Clerks II, perhaps a function of Smith now being a bit older. Instead, this film leans a bit more on the pop culture side of the equation, especially in how it mines its laughs from how much life has changed since 2001, especially with regards to the film industry that both Strike Back and this film lampooned. Geek culture has become big business, with Bluntman & Chronic now the subject of a massive fan convention in Los Angeles that serves as an extended piss-take on the marriage between what had once been a niche fandom and the Hollywood machine. That said, some things never change, and Hollywood is still relying on recycled old properties to make its bank, even if the films they make may feel misguided from the start (we see a clip of Bluntman v Chronic, and it somehow looks even worse than the last one). This isn't a necessarily deep satire of such, but as somebody who got a lot of what this film was making fun of, there were moments when I was laughing harder than my mom was. Speaking of geek stuff, the film is also jam-packed with fanservice and Easter eggs for longtime fans of the View Askewniverse, with plenty of actors from prior films making welcome cameos, with one in particular towards the end making for a great bookend for Chasing Amy. (I've said in the past that, had Shannon Elizabeth not been typecast as "the hot chick", she would've made a great comedic leading lady, and I stand by it.)
Not all the humor worked, though. The running gags fell flat as often as they landed, and at times I groaned as an obvious dumb joke started to creep my way. A brief scene involving Milly and her friends being captured by Klansmen (led by WWE wrestler Chris Jericho) and Jay and Silent Bob rescuing them also brought the story to a halt and wasn't quite as funny as it thought it was, barely doing anything interesting beyond one admittedly elaborate gross-out. On that note, Milly's friends weren't a particularly memorable presence. Only one of them, the Chinese exchange student Shan Yu, got anything interesting to do beyond hang around and react to Jay and Silent Bob, and what she does only happens towards the end. It felt like an attempt to replicate Justice's heist crew from Strike Back mixed with an attempt to poke fun at Hollywood's ham-handed efforts at "representation" that often amount to tokenism at best, one that not only missed the mark but often seemed to fall victim to the very things that it was trying to satirize. I liked the actors well enough, but narrowing the three of them down to just one (possibly Soapy, Milly's deaf best friend) would've worked a lot better -- not least of all because Milly and Soapy still would've worked as a "next-generation Jay and Silent Bob", keeping with the film's overall theme of sending up reboots.
The Bottom Line
If you're already a fan of these movies, you'll probably love this. If not, I recommend watching the older films first, but even so, this is still a funny, if uneven, comedy with a good heart and some good jabs.
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