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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 52.36%
Worth A Look: 21.26%
Average: 8.27%
Pretty Bad: 8.66%
Total Crap: 9.45%
11 reviews, 188 user ratings
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| Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back |
by Matt Mulcahey
"Smith Strikes Back at Hollywood and embraces movie geeks"
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“Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” is a movie filled with every offense known to man, and even some that aren’t yet. It’s a collection of bad taste, full of excessive vulgarity, sexual lewdness and all manner of political incorrectness.
Writer/director/actor Kevin Smith is aware of all of these things. Actually, he exults in them.He embraces and wallows in the fact that his film has no redeeming social value whatsoever. This is a film whose sole purpose is to make the adolescent 13-year old in all of us rejoice in its childishness.
It’s a film for those who haven’t yet become too cynical or pseudo-intellectual to enjoy the things that made them chuckle when they were in junior high.
The heroes of this raunchy exercise are Jay and Silent Bob, a pair of drug-dealing slackers who spend each day hanging out in front of the Quick-Stop convenience store peddling ganja to anyone and everyone who crosses their path.
The pair end up on a crash course with Hollywood when they learn that Bluntman and Chronic, a comic book based on the two of them, is about to be made into the movie. But their motivation isn’t the likeness check they are owed. They want to get the movie shut down so people on Internet chat sites will stop insulting them.
But the story isn’t really all that relevant. The movie is really an excuse for Smith to tie up all the loose ends of his New Jersey Chronicles, of which Jay and Silent Bob have appeared in all four prior installments (“Clerks,” “Mallrats,” “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma”.)
“Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” includes many of the characters from Smith’s past films, and contains countless cameos as well. To give away who shows up would ruin half the fun, but the numerous in-references for film buffs are what will make the movie a cult hit.
One of the film’s weaknesses, however, is the main characters themselves. Jay and Silent Bob are a matter of taste, and they are easily the least interesting inhabitants of Smith’s New Jersey world. The constant parade of more interesting characters from past films is only a reminder that most of them would be better suited for a full-length film than these two bungling idiots, who end up somewhere between Beavis and Butthead and Cheech and Chong on the evolutionary spectrum.
“Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” is the perfect example of the two sides of Kevin Smith.
On one side you have the comic-book loving dork who never grew up. On the other side you have a writer who’s produced some of the best film dialogue of the past decade.
Instead of trying to reconcile these two halves like Smith did in Dogma, he unabashedly and unashamedly embraces the lowbrow nature of his comedy. And once the duo hits Hollywood, the film really starts to connect.
It’s easy to take cheap shots at others, but Smith has guts and sense of humor enough to laugh at himself. In fact, the films favorite punching bag is Miramax films, the company that released this picture. There’s also inspired self-mockery from Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, James Van Der Beek and many more.“Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” is not a film everyone is going to enjoy. It’s a movie for film fans. It’s a movie for Kevin Smith fans. It’s a movie for anyone still in contact with the adolescent humor the young at heart never outgrow.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4714&reviewer=255
originally posted: 08/28/01 05:43:16
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USA
24-Aug-2001 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
31-Jan-2001 (M)
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