Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

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Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

In jokes need to go out

Running gags are all well and good. Indeed, there's an entire camp of literary critics (and undoubtedly movie critics) who would argue that humor is nothing more than what the writer has set up as expectations only to knock them down. Kevin Smith's films put us at rather intimate levels with his characters so that we're laughing at their jokes the same way we would laugh at our own friends' jokes. The problem with this approach is that, sooner or later (hopefully sooner), the audience will realize that they've got their own friends with their own inside jokes, and it's probably high time Smith tried coming up with some new characters and new jokes.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back has an all-star cast with several actors playing multiple roles (Ben Affleck as himself and the hapless Holden from Chasing Amy; Jason Lee as Brodie Bruce from Mall Rats and Banky Edwards from Chasing Amy...you get the idea), but the real stars are supposedly Jay (Jason Mewes, who is up the fabled creek if he can't work with Smith any more) and Silent Bob (Smith), en route across the country to secure their rights to payments for an upcoming Blunt-Man and Chronic movie. Jay delivers his usual montage of witless, chauvinistic prattle; Silent Bob, overall, is not as silent as he used to be, sometimes even blowing up at his erstwhile partner. The movie references are numerous, and while some of them are downright hysterical (like when the two stumble onto the set of a Good Will Hunting sequel), trying to watch a movie made up of a slew of movie references stuck together is a lot like doing a jigsaw puzzle made of pieces that fit, but don't have any recognizable pattern. Some might see lesbian jewel thieves, an outlaw orangutang, Mark Hamill with a giant hand and Jay and Silent Bob in spandex with lightsabers as the height of dramatic humor, but I got the feeling a lot of this was Smith and his buddies sitting around saying "Wouldn't it be funny if..." and cobbling it all together into an hour and forty minutes or so of screen time.

While not the biggest Smith fan in the world (I'm sorry, but his sharp and insightful comments about pop culture are not all that sharp and insightful), I've enjoyed his work enough over the years to hope for a better piece of closure to the View Askewiverse, but the title and trailers to this movie alone were enough to tell me that this wouldn't be it. Nothing would be good, effective closure but to simply close the series and do something, anything else. So what do we have to look forward to? The upcoming Jersey Girl (2003), where Ben Affleck plays father to his new baby daughter, probably while trying to direct movies and make comic books on the side. So much for new characters.

-Long