ReView Askew: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

No matter what you might think of Kevin Smith, whether you love his movies or despise them, there’s one thing about him that you have to admire at least in some small way: his relationship with his fan base. In the late 90s, as Clerks and Mallrats were finding their audience on videotape, Smith’s View Askew website and message board became a virtual hangout for the OG fans. They could interact with Smith directly, who used the platform to answer questions about his movies, and drop hints and advance news of what he was working on. None of Smith’s movies were ever huge financial hits, at least by Hollywood standards, but his loyal viewers have been incredibly devoted from the start, and by the turn of the millennium, Smith was well aware of this. He’s always been extremely grateful for his fans, and even this early into his career, he realized who his core audience was and how he could best cater to them. This is a creative ethos that would kick into high gear with the creation of his podcast network and the films that followed, but in 2001, we got a little taste of Smith’s gratitude with a special cinematic gift just for the hardcore View Askew-heads.

After the mini-shitstorm that Dogma generated, Kevin Smith wasn’t in the best mood to handle any big topics for his next movie, so instead he went the complete opposite direction: a big, dumb live-action cartoon, promoting his dimwitted dynamic duo from side characters to the main event. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is a $22 million in-joke, a movie filled to the brim with callbacks and references to Smith’s previous four films, a love letter to his fanbase to thank them for all the support they’ve given him in his career. It’s not so deep that I don’t think someone who hasn’t seen the other movies wouldn’t be able to follow the film, but I definitely consider it a bar for entry. I don’t see how someone completely unfamiliar the other View Askew movies could really get into this one. Even at the height of my Smith fandom in high school, I didn’t love this movie, but I still owned the DVD, and enjoyed it on the whole for the most part. There’s some degree of charm to something this self-indulgent, for a piece of art that aims this incredibly low. But as a comedy, I honestly can’t say it’s very good, and I found myself growing increasingly disinterested in it as it crawled along.

After years of loitering and dealing drugs in front of the Quick Stop, Jay and Silent Bob are finally issued a restraining order, driving them from the property. Visiting Mallrats’ Brodie’s comic shop, they are shocked to learn that “Bluntman and Chronic,” the superhero comic book based upon their likenesses, is being turned into a feature film. Tracking down Chasing Amy’s Holden for more details, they discover the horrors of Internet forum posting, finding a whole slew of comments talking about how terrible a “Bluntman” movie would be, and how much Jay and Silent Bob suck ass. Fearing their reputations are in jeopardy, Jay and Bob hitch it to Hollywood to stop the film from being made. In their travels, Jay meets, and quickly falls in love with, a young woman named Justice, and gains a traveling partner in the form of a rescued orangutan, all before finally arriving in LA and running wild on the Miramax lot.

The first ten minutes of the movie are like a star tour through Kevin Smith’s original trilogy, as we start at the Quick Stop, where we see Dante and Randal (in color!!), and after that, we’re at Brodie’s Secret Stash, filmed at Smith’s actual comic book store in Red Bank, NJ (in a nice bit of background story, we see a giant blowup of a Variety article behind the counter “BRODIE BOLTS,” explaining why he’s not still hosting The Tonight Show as we saw in the Mallrats epilogue.) Then we’re hanging with Holden McNeil and seeing what he’s up to. It’s kind of neat in concept, like Jay and Bob are wandering through the first three movies before setting off on their own adventure. The movie wastes no time dropping in refrains of the most classic lines (“I’m not even supposed to be here today,” which is repeated later in the film, “Would you like a chocolate covered pretzel?”), setting up that this film is basically going to be filled with references like this. Holden greets Jay and Bob by quoting word-for-word what Jay told him when they met at the diner in Chasing Amy. It all feels like an early sign of the rise of reference humor that plagues modern-day franchises, paying “homage” in recreating beloved moments by trotting out legacy actors to say lines from the older movies for fans to stand up and cheer at. It’s pretty lame writing, but at least there’s a simple innocence to when Kevin Smith does it, versus some $200 million nostalgia jerk-offs like Jurassic World or the new Star Wars trilogy.

So finally, after four films in the periphery, Jay and Silent Bob are in the driver’s seat as our protagonists. But can they carry a movie? Are they compelling leads? This may be shocking to hear, but not really. Jay is pretty much our focal character, for obvious reasons, and he does start to wear out his welcome around halfway into the movie. To be fair, in terms of crafting a story around a stupid, sex-craved loudmouth, I don’t see how it could have been done more compellingly than this. When he and Bob find out about the “Bluntman and Chronic” movie, their motivation initially is to get their cut of the cash, but upon being shown the insidious Internet commentary about it, Jay’s mission turns to one of rage (“I’m gonna kill all those fucks…”) and pride, as they quickly shift from trying to profit from the movie to wanting it completely shut down, worrying about the harm it’ll cause their good names (Affleck gets in a good response, “I don’t know how good your names are…”) Over the course of the film, Jay falls in lust, then love (at least the closest emotion to “love” he can reach), but getting the girl at the end doesn’t involve any specific sacrifice or grand romantic gesture on his part. Jay’s the same dope going into the movie as he is coming out. They don’t shoehorn a character arc in for him, they don’t make him have any sort of epiphany or learn a lesson. Jay is still Jay, and that feels the most appropriate.

Keeping Jay and Silent Bob in-character for the entire film is all well and good, but that ultimately means the schtick starts to get tired. I talked about how perfect they were utilized in Dogma, as comic characters sitting off to the side of the main story line, getting in their joke lines and even helping out in the actual plot in the end. Here, it just becomes overexposure, with them front and center solo for an entire feature film. Since Jay and Bob are on this cross-county trip mostly by themselves, they don’t really interact directly with a lot of people for most of the runtime, with a lot of their brushes with other characters being just for a brief scene. Part of the fun in Dogma was having characters talking back to Jay’s nonsense, but we barely get any of that at all in Strike Back. It also doesn’t help that Jay has to carry the movie himself since he has to talk to a mute character the entire time, which makes all of his dialogue feel like it’s inside of an echo chamber. This isn’t a knock on Jason Mewes, who plays Jay as effectively as ever, but there’s just not enough of a character there to make him a compelling focal point for ninety minutes. When it comes to stories about dopey comic duos, you can lean on their personalities in reaction to different situations like Beavis and Butt-Head, or make the scenarios they’re in eccentric and crazy, like the Bill & Ted movies. Strike Back does a little of both, but doesn’t go far enough in an interesting direction with either to really stand out.

Around the middle of the country, Jay and Bob run into Justice (played by Shannon Elizabeth), an animal rights activist traveling to a testing facility to “liberate” a trapped orangutan. Unbeknownst to them, she’s actually a thief, planning on robbing the neighboring diamond exchange along with the rest of the girl gang, consisting of Eliza Dushku, Ali Larter, and… Jennifer Schwalbach Smith. You may notice one of these people is not like the other. Now, I certainly don’t want to make any rude judgements. In all honesty, it’s genuinely sweet for Kevin Smith to include his wife as a sex object in a catsuit amongst some of the hottest young actresses of the moment (apparently she asked him if she could play the part). This is the same man who arranged a Playboy spread of his wife and has a giant version of it framed in his house, the man loves his wife (obviously.) But when you get shots of all the girls together, one of them obviously stands out. It doesn’t help that they have Smith in pigtails so her larger ears are prominently featured. Although I guess it does make sense, I think in one of his Q&As, Smith said that his wife’s ears were a huge turn-on for him. …y’know what, it’s probably best to move on…

Justice is the bleeding heart of the group; while the other girls have no problem using Jay and Bob as decoys set to take the fall in their scheme (since they fucking hate them), Justice feels very guilty about it. The joke is that she sees Jay as a complete innocent, despite all the obnoxious and perverted things he constantly says to her and everyone around them. The gag is clear, but we get so many scenes of her passively ignoring offensive things coming out of Jay’s mouth, which combined with Elizabeth’s naive performance, makes Justice ends up coming off like some kind of mentally stunted simpleton. But that’s not entirely the case. In her first encounter with Jay, he has an enormous erection which Bob “covers” with a soda cup, and Justice smiles, “Oh my God, do you get free refills with that?” There’s clearly moments where she’s aware of the sexual situations and commentary, but then in another scene she’ll innocently ask Jay what a “trouser snake” is, and embrace Jay’s “cute” nickname (Boo-Boo Kitty Fuck) with an almost childlike enthusiasm. I guess Jay himself is half horny adult, half simple-minded child, so his ideal mate would be somewhat similar, but this personality, combined with the fact that most of the girl characters in these types of movies are usually written this way, a blank-slate hottie who’s charmed by the dumbass protagonist, it completely negates any sort of investment you might have in this relationship.

But none of that really matters. Justice’s character, her relationship with Jay, hell, basically the entire movie is one big joke. The girls don’t really have any unique personalities because they’re generic bad girl characters, as Ali Larter flat-out says it toward the end of the movie (“We’re walking, talking bad girl cliches!”) The movie is incredibly broad, with lots of characters who fall into being exaggerated archetypes. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but even a bonkers comedy benefits by having some sort of grounded element to it, or some relatable character to latch onto, but there’s not much of that here. The humor here also most definitely skews closer to the juvenile nature of Mallrats. Post-There’s Something About Mary, we’re deep into the era of the gross out comedy, but there’s nothing really outrageous in here to make it stand out on that front, just a lot of simple dick and fart jokes (in the first few minutes, we get a glory shot of Jay’s bare ass farting, which didn’t bode well for the rest of the film.) The Golgothan in Dogma was more vile than any of the gags here.

There’s also an awful amount of gay jokes, both regarding actual gay sex (mostly Jay adamantly refusing to suck cock, saying Bob sucks cock, and so on) and using the term “gay” as a derogatory term. There’s one scene this felt particularly weird in: as the girl gang is setting up their heist, Eliza Dushku and Jennifer Schwalbach give each other silent hand signals as the latter runs off to perform her job. After a beat, Shannon Elizabeth says to Dushku, “You are so gay!” I truly don’t get what about what Dushku did provoked that line, it’s really strange. It’s possible it meant she was saying she was literally gay, but it’s never made clear that she is in the movie. And even if she was, what’s the point of that line? But anyway, this, sadly, was just where humor was at at the time, with lots of 2000s comedies, even stuff on network television, getting in their easy gay jokes, or using “gay” as an adjective slur. Even The Simpsons did it a lot. Smith certainly comes off as an incredibly accepting figure, so I don’t think he had any hateful intentions with any of this. But given the frat bro nature of the humor, and the young male audience this kind of movie caters most to, I don’t think this was really doing the gay community any favors.

Strike Back also gets off on its meta-ness, it’s the meta-est movie that ever meta’d. As set up in the scene at Holden’s pad, the premise is Jay and Bob being outraged a movie about them is being made. Affleck posits, “A Jay and Silent Bob movie? Who would pay to see that?” Then he, Jay and Bob look directly at the camera, with Smith smiling. This “stare at the camera” joke is repeated twice: when Will Ferrell says a plot development feels like something out of a bad movie, and later Ben Affleck (the real Ben Affleck) talks about agreeing to do a movie as a favor to a friend, since Smith was lucky enough to sink his talons into Affleck early, who by this point in his career, was a huge movie star. The idea of a movie about how bad the idea of that movie is is novel in concept, and one the movie openly embraces. The Will Ferrell line specifically feels like an early sign of Smith’s constant defense mechanism in openly discussing how he knows he’s a bad writer/directer. As he admits, he’ll happily make the jokes about himself first before critics get a chance to. That’s probably the thing I dislike most about Smith. When he says stuff like that, it doesn’t read as cutely self-deprecating, it just feels like an admission that you’re not confident in what you’re doing. I feel like I was more receptive to this kind of humor when I was younger, but I’m not as keen on it now. It’s good for a piece of art, especially a comedic one, to have a sense of humor about itself, but not at the expense of its own integrity. The movie literally ends with Smith’s cadre of characters (Dante and Randal, Alyssa and Rene, Hooper X and Banky) walking out of the “Bluntman and Chronic” movie talking about how much it fucking sucked; there’s some degree of humor to the self-referential material, but it’s just so harshly tearing itself down that it’s hard to really laugh at it for me.

A crazy thing about this movie is not only is it filled with Smith regulars making cameos, it’s also got tons of appearances by comic actors in the brief window of time before they exploded in popularity and became household names. Jon Stewart, Tracy Morgan, even Jamie Kennedy, a year before his briefly successful hidden camera show, all these big recognizable stars (well, the first two names, at least) just show up in these small roles here. The biggest of them all is Will Ferrell, mere years before Old School and Anchorman, when he’d become the biggest comedy star in Hollywood. He plays Marshal Willenholly, a Federal Wildlife officer who assigns himself in charge of the Jay and Silent Bob manhunt, believing it’s his jurisdiction because of their orangutan “prisoner.” You can pretty easily imagine what his character is: bumbling, slightly awkward, a yelling, whining man child, the kind of persona you’d see in dozens of future Will Ferrell movies is in its primordial form here. I’m not a big fan of Ferrell’s work in general; he got one or two chuckles out of me (his genuinely surprised “That was an incredibly daring escape!” after Jay and Bob retreat down a sewer pipe is pretty funny), but he doesn’t really come off as a highlight of the movie for me.

Once Jay and Bob finally get to Hollywood, we get even more guest star appearances. They run through the set of a fake Scream 4, where Shannon Doherty unmasks Ghostface to reveal he’s just the orangutan. Director Wes Craven also appears, who gives a sweet, very-much-not-an-actor performance (“The market research says people love monkeys!”) This was part of a weird Miramax crossover where Jay and Silent Bob had a cameo in Scream 3 the year before for some reason. Chris Rock appears as the director of the “Bluntman and Chronic” movie, where his only joke is him screaming about how everyone on set is white and he’s black. It’s sort of like Hooper X from Chasing Amy, except without the joke of him using the militant black power character as a persona. There’s also some casting couch jokes that haven’t aged well too. And then there’s Mark Hamill, who appears as the evil Cockknocker (accompanied by a freeze frame with text on the screen, “Hey Kids! It’s Mark Hamill!”), who, after Silent Bob uses the “Force” to grab his own weapon (in a Mallrats callback), engages in an all-out duel. At this point, realism has been handily tossed out the window, and we’ve gone from self-indulgence to Kevin Smith wish fulfillment. But there’s still part of me that can’t help but feel a little good about a scene like this. Ten years earlier, Kevin Smith was some nobody kid from Jersey living at home with his mom watching his Star Wars video tapes, and now he’s directing and starring in a movie where he gets to have a lightsaber fight with Luke Skywalker himself. What a personal success story for him.

Jay and Bob spend a lot of time being chased around the movie lot by security, which is unfortunate since it inevitably makes me think of one of the best movies ever made, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (they even hijack a bike at one point, so there’s no way this wasn’t a deliberate reference.) They end up taking the places of their on-screen counterparts Jason Biggs and James Van Der Beek (in one of the best lines, upon finally showing up in their superhero outfits on the elaborate “Bluntman” movie set, after a big epic music cue, Jay remarks, “Boy, this must have set them back a couple hundred bucks.”) Then we get the Mark Hamill fight, Marshal Willenholly and Justice show up, then the other girls show up and they get into a shootout, and Shannon Elizabeth and Eliza Dushku have a cat fight that’s really embarrassing. Our “conflict” is resolved by Jay and Bob finally encountering Banky Edwards, who agrees to give them two-thirds of his salary for their troubles. He ups that offer himself from half, which I don’t quite understand. Maybe he was covering his ass out of fear Jay and Bob could sue him for not paying them in the first place, but it’s not really conveyed that way, so I don’t know. Justice gives herself and the other girls up to Willenholly in exchange for a reduced sentence, she and Jay kiss, the “Bluntman” movie comes out and everybody hates it, but who cares, we have a big dance party ending with Morris Day and the Time. The plotting of this movie is so tight, it’s like a Swiss watch!

My favorite moment of the movie is actually towards the ending: despite Jay getting the girl and Bob getting the monkey, they’re still pissed about those online commenters. What can they do? Use all their “Bluntman” money to fly all over the globe, track down the anonymous keyboard warriors who defamed them, and beat the living shit out of them. It’s a really funny sequence; going door to door with a giant stack of papers, with Bob dramatically thumbing through and pointing at a page for Jay to read back a scathing post to the author. Plus they’re pummeling pre-teen boys to start with, which is just great, maybe the most “extreme” comedic moment of the movie. Smith was tuned into the world of online posting at a very early time, especially in depicting it in a major motion picture (it kind of blew my mind when Holden shows off the 2000-era moviepoopshoot.com, which felt like such a time capsule for me remembering back to early Internet web pages. Each individual comment was its own page! The early Internet was wild!) The concept of someone fantasizing about finding where someone who said some shit about them on Twitter lives and beating them up is maybe even more relevant now than it was twenty years ago. Although you can also read it in a darker light when you think of real life instances of swatting, and actual violence resulting from some dumb Internet argument someone had. But just like a lot of this movie, it was a seemingly more innocent time, so it was nice to look back at a time when the people ranting online mostly were just a bunch of dumb kids or huge nerd lingers playing tough guy, and to see them get mercilessly beaten for it.

In one of Kevin Smith’s Q&A specials, there was a bit where Smith was talking about his mother’s reactions to all of his movies. When it came to Strike Back, all she could say was that it was “really cute” and that he and Mewes “ran around a lot,” which, in a way, I feel is the most charitable thing you can say about this movie. It feels like a film that everybody had fun making, like when you see behind-the-scenes of a shitty comedy and everybody’s cracking up and you’re baffled, wondering what the hell are they laughing at. But I guess I have enough goodwill left for Kevin Smith that I just can’t hate this movie. I certainly don’t think it’s good, there’s a lot of it that just doesn’t work, with a whole bunch of jokes that seem lame at best or offensive at worst. But even despite it being ever so slightly shoved up its own ass, Smith is aiming to please his audience, and it’s clear that he has, so who am I to argue with the effectiveness of the film? It’s definitely a refrain that would be applicable to some of his future movies, which is why at times, they feel like teflon to criticism. I definitely rank it above Mallrats, since I find Jay, flawed as he is, a much more palatable protagonist than Brodie, and there are a few clever ideas and alright jokes in here that keep it from being a total disaster. For the hardcore View Askew fans, this was an absolute dream, that when it was released, was intended to be a fond farewell to these characters and the View Askewniverse, and Kevin Smith crafted the perfect goodbye gift for his most devoted followers. The movie even closes after the credits with God (Alanis Morissette) closing the book on the View Askewniverse, so this felt as definitive as it got at the time. It was time for Smith to move on, but it wouldn’t be long before he took one more trip to the well. More on that later, but for now, snootchie bootchies, little nootchies.