In an effort to escape watching The Lawrence Welk show last Saturday night*, I decided to go out to the movies. After searching all over the place for a theater (boy they are closing down a lot around the Seattle area!), I finally settled on going down to Federal Way. It turned out they were playing a Sneak Preview of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the new film by Kevin Smith, director of such movies as Dogma, Clerks, and Chasing Amy ** so I decided to check it out. I have had mixed feelings about Smith’s movies in the past but overall I have enjoyed his films ***.


In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back we see the two drug dealers, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith****) from Kevin Smith’s previous films in their first feature film. At the start of the film, they are barred from their customary spot outside the convenience store (where they push drugs). Then they are hit by another blow. The comic characters based on themselves, Bluntman and Chronic (with their alter egos Jay and Silent Bob) ***** are appearing in a feature film and Jay and Silent Bob not only aren’t getting any money from the film, they are also getting dissed on the internet about it. Jay and Silent Bob won’t stand for it!

So our two heroes decide to travel to California to stop the picture. As they hitchhike their way from New Jersey they have some adventures including difficulties in hitchhiking, and a run-in with a girl named
Justice (Shannon Elizabeth) and her gang of girls that persuade them to steal a baboon.

Will the two stop the picture?

Will Jay get a date?

Will Silent Bob talk and if so, what will he say?

The answers to these questions and more are in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back!


This film was just trying to be too much for my tastes. It is basically a cross between a spoof film, a road trip film, a satire, and a fast-talking, uncensored dialogue bit with the typically crass language from the other films). At times I just didn’t know what to think. There are some cool cameos by just about everyone in the previous "New Jersey films" as well as other actors that I did double takes with (was that Carrie Fisher playing a nun??). Overall though the jokes left me feeling as if they left out the punchlines. They just didn’t get outrageous enough or the delivery was just not there.*****

The dialogue was not too bad but the actors just didn’t quite get it right. The acting frequently felt amateurish rather than polished. While witty dialogue is a positive thing, the more witty the dialogue, the tougher it is for it to come off naturally (while still being something the audience can connect with). The dialogue in this particular film isn’t the wittiest I have ever heard nor is it the most natural feeling. The actors say it too quickly or not with enough feeling to give it a feeling that it isn't staged. The film is filled with the prerequisite amount of obscenity for the series (lots and LOTS of it) but not enough of the fun.

A lot of the gags seemed as if they could have been funny if they had just been done differently while others just didn’t really seem to connect with the rest of the film. Yeah I guess this was supposed to be something of the drug culture sort of film but I would have rather have had a bit more fun watching it. Among the scenes that didn’t work were a pseudo Scooby Doo scene with cracks at how Velma might have been a lesbian and other stuff that I have heard rumors/comments about on the internet for a while now. Another one was a scene with George Carlin describing how hitchhikers are ‘supposed’ to give blowjobs for rides.

One positive/negative thing about the show was that many of the actors really were quite self-effacing and got in a couple digs about themselves, with Ben Affleck (in character) ragging on Ben Affleck (the actor/not the character). This actually was a little funny but it did seem as if he probably chose the dialogue himself. This was probably the case with a few different actors that were featured (they chose their own dialogue), including Chris Rock who played a (Spike Leeish?) director that I really thought was incredibly unfunny.

On the mixed side was the fact that Jay is continuously ragging on Silent Bob’s character throughout the film, about him being fat, about him being homosexual, and about him being friends with a monkey. I actually started feeling sorry for Silent Bob and it just didn’t get any better. While I can appreciate Kevin Smith having some guts for hanging himself out for onscreen criticism and it is terribly self-effacing of him, I really liked the Silent Bob character in the previous films (much more than the Jay character) and I thought it would have been nice if they had done a bit more with him. He is basically just a sidekick to Jay in this film. When you are watching a buddy film though, it is nice if both of the buddies actually get some airtime. The Silent Bob gimick is cool (the fact that he never talks) but it doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t at least have a girlfriend or something like that!

Another mixed bag was Shannon Elizabeth who played Justice******, Jay’s potential girlfriend. I think that the character was meant to be a ditzy but innocent girl but the performance was so varied that I wasn’t ever really sure what the focus was supposed to be. This made a couple of the jokes that were supposed to be really funny fall flat for me (such as when she proudly declares her nickname of Kitty Booboo f---). It could have been a pretty funny character but she just didn’t manage to play it tongue-in-cheekly enough. She seemed trapped between playing the supersexy girl (such as she did in American Pie) and the sexy-but-airheaded/innocent girl that it seemed this film was supposed to have in it. I can’t put all of the blame on her but I think that she would do better with a less impromptu director.

The spoofs were pretty mixed too. In the film they spoof films like The Fugitive, Entrapment, and of course Star Wars*******. Sometimes it was really funny but sometimes it just seemed as if they had a big set-up to get the spoof into the film with very little payoff for the joke. I did get a kick with the Star Wars ending featuring Mark Hammill (who reprised his role of the Trickster from the Flash television show of a while back********) as the villain who fights with his lightsaber against Jay/Silent Bob. Pretty fun, not too serious with a hackneyed buildup to it but so the heck what??? The other ones were just there.

Kevin Smith seems to have a thing against Miramax. There was a strong undercurrent in the plot against the studio. While it was kinda fun for a little while, it got pretty old for me in a hurry. From my own perspective, I don’t care about movie studios that much. A discussion of them might be good for a brief conversation but not a lot beyond that.

I have a thing against Will Farrell. I just don't really like his sense of humor. He is always playing these zoned-out ambiguously-sexual characters who just aren’t funny. His comic timing is too choppy and blunt and I can’t say that I have ever seen him in a part larger than a bit one that I have ever found funny (I chortled a bit in Austin Powers but after about four seconds his part got old*********). Here he plays Jay and Silent Bob’s pursuer after they steal a baboon from a lab in Colorado.

Overall I did have an all right time watching this film but not as much fun as I was hoping to have. I can’t recommend the film to anyone but fans of the trilogy though because of its inconsistencies, mediocre acting, and that it just didn’t go all the way with its ideas. It felt more like an unfinished concept piece than a polished film. It tried to go in too many directions and ended up not satisfying with any of them.


FOOTNOTES (yeah yeah yeah kinda a pain to read but my thoughts about this film were all over the board)

* I am living with my Aunt/Grandfather while looking for a place in Seattle. My Grandpa is a HUGE Lawrence Welk fan and watches it every week it is on. I try to go out on Saturdays.

** Mallrats is Kevin Smith’s other film. Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy are all films in his New Jersey series. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is the last film in the series. Dogma didn’t really seem to be part of the series.

*** For the record, I liked Clerks quite a bit, thought Mallrats was only so so but wasn’t as down on it as a lot of people are, liked Chasing Amy all right, and liked Dogma but not as much as most.

**** Yes the same Kevin Smith that directs the movie also plays Silent Bob.

***** Note that when I say that the movie is funny in parts, I was in a really good mood for watching this sort of film. I laughed when the previews konked out. I laughed when the previews konked out again after ten more seconds. I laughed when it happened again in another five seconds(after a five-minute wait). I laughed when we switched theaters because they couldn't get the film to work after another ten minutes. I even laughed when I barely managed to get approximately the same seat I had before (that I had waited twenty minutes to get). So bear in mind that I could laugh at just about anything. Note also that the viewing audience was made up nearly entirely of fans who liked the humor of the first films so it definitely was the target audience.

****** or Jussie/Josie--when she first showed up with her girlfriend gang right after the Scooby Doo scene, I thought that they were going to be a spoof on Josie and the Pussycats

******* Having a parody of Star Wars is probably a necessary thing when the very name of the film you are doing is a reference to The Empire Strikes Back

******** Yes I realize that he played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars trilogy but he definitely wasn’t hamming up his Luke role! The closest I could see his villain, Cockblocker, coming to anything he had previously done would be the role from The Flash TV series.

********* OK, maybe less than four seconds and maybe none at all. I was just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt and searching for something that he might have possibly been funny in. Really tough to do.


Recommended:
No