Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith) 1/2
The Kevin Smith universe is a strange place indeed. As writer and director of his View Askew features, Smith incorporates complex in-jokes as much to be indulgent as for the benefit of the quality of the film. His casts are often comprised of Smith's friends as opposed to bona fide actors, so we get the feeling that everyone is merely working on a high end video class project. Much of the dialogue tends to evoke carefully thought out arguments but are orated by performers who race through them with all the forethought of a garden slug. And all the time, we are outsiders looking in, trying to keep pace with words such as "snootchie bootchies" while marvelling at Smith's Midas-like ability to elicit carte blanche for his production budgets.
Amidst the angst-filled and often irritating characters, there is one constant in Smith's universe, and that is the presence of the foul-mouthed Jay (Jason Mewes) and his pudgy sidekick Silent Bob (Smith). They are the drug-dealing self-professed sages that permeate all of these films, for better or for worse. In Smith's fifth effort, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the dynamic duo is front and centre in what is essentially a road picture. Ironically, because these two never claim to be any kind of great thinkers, the movie works better than Smith's other installments (although I have yet to see the heavily-hyped Dogma). Jay and Silent Bob are quintessential low-brow characters and, subsequently, the movie descends to their level.
It begins at the Quick Stop convenience store from Smith's other features. Jay and Silent Bob get banned from hanging out in front of there, but soon catch wind of a new motion picture in the works that is an adaptation of a comic book based on them. Irked they will be missing out on royalties, they vow to go to Hollywood to foil the movie shoot. On their way, without a vehicle of their own to drive, they come across a zany array of people. George Carlin and Carrie Fisher make brief cameos, the Scooby Doo gang is depicted, and a group of female jewel thieves (led by Shannon Elizabeth as Justice, Jay's love interest) all appear to further complicate matters.
Once in Hollywood, Jay and Silent Bob stumble onto film shoots for sequels to Good Will Hunting and Scream and many of the actual performers appear, all in good fun, to parody themselves. By the time the one and only Mark Hamill shows up as a punk-haired villain for a light saber duel, one has to wonder who isn't going to make a guest appearance. As Jay and Silent Bob run around with a monkey, pursued by Diedrich Bader as a security guard (and, in the funniest performance of the film, Will Ferrell as a Federal Wildlife Marshall), the cameos and guest appearance approach a feverish pitch and everyone ends up at a live concert performance by Morris Day and the Time(!).
As expected, any modicum of acting is practically non-existent in this Porky's-like romp, but for once that detriment actually works to its advantage. Everyone's on equal footing, in particular with some people playing themselves, while others reprising roles from past movies, while still others are playing characters within characters, so it's all good. There are a few special effects here and there intended to set up some plot points, but ultimately the big chuckles come from vulgarity and profanity the likes of which are ordinarily reserved for The Trailer Park Boys. The respective scenes with Jon Stewart and Seann William Scott are among the funniest, but Ferrell becomes the biggest scene-stealer, going for broke as he so often does in role after role.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back walks a transparent line between pop culture reverence and scathing potshots. Ultimately, it's not a great movie. Heck, it's not even a very good one. But it did make me laugh on a few occasions, and the sheer volume of digs at Hollywood, including its genres and its bloated celebrities, is enough to award it a passing grade. In Smith's previous features, he seemed to be happy to flick the video camera on, shoot everything in one take and hope his editors and viewers would be able to sort out everything else. Here, he produces short, succinct scenes one after the other which helpfully keep things moving along at a good clip. With a $20 million budget under Smith's belt, it's ironic that he has gone on the record and said this picture will be the last time he will be visiting these macrocosmic characters. Based on this unlikely example of his mastery of potty humour featuring some of Hollywood's elite, if you ask me, Smith was finally just starting to get a hang of them.
