Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

I believe the New York Times called Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back the perfect movie for 14 year-olds, and the 14 year-old in me (don’t say it) agrees wholeheartedly.  Jay & Silent Bob is unbelievably juvenile.  Fart jokes, dick jokes, gay jokes, drug jokes, and hot chicks in leather.  What’s not to love?  It may also have taken the crown from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut for most profanity used in a movie.  And like that movie, it’s explosively funny, though not as funny as South Park was.

The plot (a better word might be “setup”) starts with Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and director Kevin Smith, the Gromit to Mewes’ Wallace) discovering that their “friend” Banky (Jason Lee) has sold the rights to the comic book Bluntman & Chronic, which was more or less the story of Jay and Silent Bob’s lives, to Miramax.  Jay and Silent Bob are horrified that they didn’t get paid for the sale of those rights like they were supposed to, but they’re even madder about the fact that all of these nameless Internet movie geeks (again, don’t say it) are trashing their name.  Guided by their infallible logic, they decide to go to Hollywood and stop the movie.  It would be unfair to say more.

I think this movie served two purposes for Smith.  First off, it allowed him to kill the View Askew universe off for good, and that’s probably not a bad idea.  Secondly, and this point is much more obvious than the first one, it gave Smith a platform to thumb his nose at multiple projects either recently inflicted upon us moviegoers or on their way to a googleplex near you in the not-too-distant future. (Miramax, which distributed Jay & Silent Bob through their Dimension branch, took more hits than anyone)  This may not make him many friends at the rival studios, but perhaps it’ll make Warners think twice about that ridiculous live action Scooby Doo movie they’re making.  Shelve it, guys, I’m begging you.

The movie is not perfect, though.  Jay and Silent Bob were my favorite parts of the first three View Askew movies (Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy), but that’s because they were supporting characters.  The more they came into the spotlight (Dogma), the less funny they became.  Too much of a good thing is a bad thing, I suppose.  There were a few references to older movies that could have been better chosen (there was one very subtle Fugitive reference, one blatant one).  I loved the cameos, however.  You name it, they’re in it, or at least they’re made fun of in it.

Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back is, for better and for worse, a typical Kevin Smith movie.  If he could just shake the Farrelly Brother in him and stick with the higher brow stuff, he’d make something truly brilliant.  As it is, he’s making movies for 14 year-olds like me, and that’s not so bad.  But he can do better.