ReView Askew: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)

In the thirteen years since Clerks II, Kevin Smith’s career made a number of different turns, and to go over each of his ensuing films would be pretty exhaustive. I think the most influential event for him in that time was the birth of the SModcast, a podcast hosted by Smith and longtime producer and friend Scott Mosier, where they would basically talk for hours on end about whatever was on their minds. Its popularity would eventually lead to a series of different podcasts hosted by Smith, forming the SModcast podcast network. Now the man who could never stop himself from talking in interviews and live events had a brand-new outlet to gab on and on for multiple hours a week on various different shows he’d co-host with Mosier, Jason Mewes, his wife, Ralph Garman, and many others. Kevin Smith had built his career upon writing scripts filled with characters who were pretty much all versions of himself, communicating his likes, his dislikes, his theories, his profane thoughts, and so forth. Sure, there were stories and characters involved, but they were all basically vessels for Smith’s personal thoughts on things. But now he didn’t need to spend months making a multi-million dollar movie to broadcast his feelings on a certain subject. All he needed was a microphone, and he could record a podcast and release it that day to his legions of fans. Podcasting proved to be the perfect creative outlet for Smith to express himself, so what did he need to keep making movies for?

The 2010s is when Smith’s filmography starts to get weird, as he surprisingly started to dip into the horror genre. First was Red State, a movie Smith had been gestating for a while, and one I was very intrigued by: a thriller featuring antagonists based on the Westboro Baptist Church, the extremist religious hate group best known for picketing anywhere they’ll get media attention with their “God Hates Fags” signs. I remember being disappointed by the movie, but it’s been forever since I’ve seen it. As well as being a big departure for Smith thematically, Red State was also the first film he financed on his own, as he pretty much divorced himself from the major Hollywood system after this. Without needing to cater to a mass audience outside of his fans anymore, Smith could basically get away with whatever weird shit he wanted. Enter Tusk, a movie born entirely from a joke. The premise (a horror film about a man who gets turned into a walrus) started as a dumb bit Smith and Mosier came up with during an episode of SModcast, with Smith calling up his fans to tweet #WalrusYes if they wanted them to really make the movie. So, of course, his listeners happily endorsed him, and he actually went through it. Tusk, and its ensuing spin-off Yoga Hosers, were movies that acted as even bigger inside jokes than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, as they were filled with easter eggs and references to Kevin Smith’s different podcasts, as Smith was more or less embracing that whatever he makes, he’s doing it for his already well-insulated fans who will understand and rejoice at any obscure callback he tosses them. This leads us to Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, an in-joke stuffed inside another in-joke, a movie made exclusively for the Kevin Smith faithful, even more so than Strike Back was. I saw this in theaters when it came out in a room filled with View Askew-heads, complete with a surprise appearance by Kevin Smith to introduce it, and the audience absolutely ate it up. It’s the absolute ideal setting to watch this movie in, as even though consciously I didn’t think it was very good, I still found the entire theater experience to be pretty positive. And after seeing it again, I’ll say that that was probably the only context you should watch this movie and not want to turn it off after the first half hour, if not earlier.

We’ve been living in an entertainment era filled with tons of properties getting rebooted, where the original actors will make their grand return many years later to reprise their iconic roles, and for me, a lot of times this comes off as kind of depressing. I remember out of quarantine boredom in 2020, I decided to watch the fifth season of Arrested Development (free piece of advice: do not try this at home.) I really didn’t care for the initial Netflix revival season 4, but it was 2020 and I had endless time to kill. The season kicks off immediately after the final scene from season 4, so we cross-cut between 2013 Michael Cera, to 2013 Jason Bateman, then to 2018 Michael Cera, who looked like he’d aged a decade. Aside from Bateman (and Alia Shawkat, who is fucking gorgeous), the entire main cast just looked so old, and it felt a little sad seeing them try to recreate the magic of their comedic interplay from over fifteen years prior. They were doing their best, but so much time had passed, and sadly the characters ended up feeling like pale shadows of their former selves. Time marches on, and eventually, we need to move forward with it. Now, there certainly is a place for telling new stories in an established world, but the kinds of stories need to change based on the passage of time. Hell, Clerks II did it, towing that line between recreating the trappings of the original work while acknowledging that things need to change after so long. But Dante and Randal are actual characters that you can have grow and build a larger story out of. As for Jay and Silent Bob, any attempts to weave a more complex and emotional narrative around them will inevitably be extremely bizarre.

I feel kind of foolish expecting any sort of realism from a fucking Jay and Silent Bob movie, but it’s really weird how the two characters basically seem like they’ve been frozen in amber for twenty years. And unlike someone like Pee-Wee Herman (another classic character exhumed for a modern outing, 2016’s Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday), Jay and Bob, nor the world they inhabit, are really exaggerated or fantastical enough to fully get away with being mostly unchanged. In Smith’s original five movies, you can sort of buy Jay and Silent Bob as these twenty-something low lives who just kind of hang out, deal drugs and say wacky catchphrases. But Mewes and Smith are in their late forties here, and they sure look it. How in the hell have these two been able to survive on Earth for this long? I guess the built-in excuse is that they’re still living off their original “Bluntman and Chronic” movie money, but how could that possibly be? That was almost twenty years ago, as well with them being at least fifty grand poorer after lending the money to get the Quick Stop reopened. I assume they live together, but where? How much can they possibly make dealing drugs to keep them afloat? Again, these seem like really silly questions to be positing about a movie that’s a self-referential fuck fest, but I can’t help thinking of this stuff when I’m looking at two nearly fifty-year-old men dressed and acting like cartoon characters.

The stage is set pretty clearly as to what you’re getting yourself into right from the start of the film. Dante arrives to open the Quick Stop only for it to be swarmed by a SWAT team (giving him yet another opportunity to repeat, “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”) The feds are after Jay and Silent Bob, wanted for operating an illegal weed dispensary in the former RST Video. Jay is teargassed out of the store, and upon “hilariously” mishearing the sergeant’s orders, he drops his pants, revealing his smooth, tucked groin area as “Goodbye Horses” plays. It’s a reference to him doing this in Clerks II, which in itself was a Silence of the Lambs reference. When I revisited Strike Back, it felt a little annoyingly indulgent in its self-referential humor, but it’s got nothing on Reboot. We get returning characters from Smith’s previous films just like in Strike Back, but making even bigger on-the-nose callbacks (having moved his comic shop into a dead mall, Brodie complains about all the “mall rats,” referring to literal rats.) Characters will reference other movies and pop culture figures. Kevin Smith’s own recent history becomes fodder for references, as Jay and Silent Bob attempt to book a flight on “Southbest Airlines” and are denied entry, referring to Kevin Smith’s famous feud with Southwest. They also explain Silent Bob’s weight loss as a result of him going vegan, two more Smith personal life checkmarks. The references will just compound on each other, with a real-world reference paired with a quote from an older movie paired with a funny catchphrase. It just gets to be overkill at a point. Strike Back barely had a story, but it still had one. Reboot at times feels like a story might as well not even be there.

Later in the movie, Jason Mewes has some more emotional heavy-lifting to do in this movie than Strike Back, but he’s as game to play Jay as ever, if not a little more lower-register and less energetic. Kevin Smith, whose pantomime as Silent Bob was already on a nice baseline of cartooniness, is full-on mugging here, just going wild with his over-exaggerated reactions. There’s a running gag where he can now communicate through texting, which involves a lengthy set-up of him over-theatrically tapping loudly on his smartphone, then turning it around to reveal a single emoji, a joke that’s kind of cute the first time, but feels so long and tired each ensuing time. Also, for some reason, the Silent Bob speaking moment in this movie involves him reciting Alec Baldwin’s speech from Glengarry Glen Ross to a bunch of Klansmen to serve as a distraction for Jay. I have absolutely no idea why the fuck Smith wanted to do this reference, especially something so old and overdone (when The Boss Baby beats you to the punch, you know you’re too late.) It isn’t even commented on or reacted to by Jay or any other character, he just does it and the movie moves on. Maybe Smith did a bit about the Glengarry speech on one of his podcasts and this is just another reference. Like we’ve gone beyond just referencing something as a joke, now we’re referencing the time someone else made a reference.

Okay, so what the hell is this movie about? The set-up is identical to Strike Back, only with Jay and Bob finding out the old “Bluntman and Chronic” movie is getting rebooted, complete with a gender-bent Chronic (“They took away my dick and made me a girl!”) Even worse, it’s being directed by Kevin Smith, making him pretty much the antagonist, so of course we get lots of characters talking about how much they hate Kevin Smith, how much he sucks, his movies are terrible, and so forth. And with that, the dynamic duo are off to Hollywood once again, looking to crash Chronic-Con, the pop culture expo created off of the original “Bluntman” movie, to stop the reboot from being finished. Stopping in Colorado, Jay is shocked to discover his old flame Justice is out of prison working as a TV weatherperson, so he and Bob pay her a visit. He never visited her over this last nineteen years as he believed they couldn’t get a conjugal visit (Justice is relieved to hear this logical explanation, supporting my theory of her being mentally challenged.) It turns out they actually have a child together Jay never knew about (I guess they had sex sometime between reuniting on the “Bluntman” set in Strike Back and her getting arrested?), 18-year-old Millennium Falcon, or just “Milly,” played by Harley Quinn Smith, Kevin Smith’s daughter (naming your child after something from pop culture being another reference to Smith’s personal life).

Milly threatens her way into getting Jay and Bob to take her with them to Hollywood, as well as her other friends. We first meet Sopapilla, a deaf black girl, which is a cute analogue of Silent Bob to her Jay. Later they’re joined by a Muslim girl named Jihad (yes, really) and a Chinese girl, Shan Yu. It turns out these girls are craftier than they appear, having orchestrated a plan of their own to get to Hollywood (using giant blueprints, just like in Mallrats) so they can take Shan Yu to Chronic-Con. Earlier, Brodie talked about how modern reboots add youth and diversity to a movie you loved as a kid. As Jay directly observes, these characters are the rebooted girl gang from Strike Back: instead of a bunch of underwritten, hyper-sexualized bad girls in catsuits, they’re an underwritten, racially diverse group of super smart, always-in-command girls with tragic backstories. It’s one of the only really clever ideas in the movie in terms of actually parodying reboots, but there’s not a lot else that’s really done with it. Jihad is played by Aparna Brielle, who was really great on the NBC/Peacock sitcom A.P. Bio, but she doesn’t get a whole lot to do. She does screech the movie to a halt when she mentions back in Syria, she was sexually victimized, almost murdered by her brother for “shaming their family,” then shipped off to America. It’s dropped like a ton of bricks, then immediately followed by Milly and Jihad talking how much they’d love to fuck Chris Hemsworth. It’s so weird, like for two seconds, Smith wanted to address the fucked up shit women have to endure in the seemingly modern world, but then remembered what script he was writing and course corrected. Soon after that, we learn the four girls all bonded over never having knew their fathers, with Milly being the most devastated by it. Jay, sadly, can’t admit the truth just yet, as he promised Justice he’d keep his identity a secret.

Unlike Strike Back, Reboot is actually aiming to tell an emotional story of Jay embracing being a father and being a part of Milly’s life. This stands in opposition to most of the rest of the movie, which is filled to the brim with fourth-grade-level humor. Jay and Bob’s chicken sandwich shop (the front for their weed dispensary) is called “Cock Smokers.” The in-universe ride sharing app is “Ride Me Now,” with an icon of a stick figure throttling its dick into someone’s mouth. These feel like brand names that were rejected billboards you’d see in Grand Theft Auto V, and I was shocked that game was still leaning on such infantile and outdated material like that back in 2013. One of the Silent Bob texting gags involve him typing an eggplant emoji to a Mooby’s cashier, asking for a vegan meal, but she think he’s referring to his cock. Hey, did you guys know that’s what the eggplant emoji means? There’s lots of jokes throughout that just feel very lazy like this, which combined with the nonstop references, made the movie a pretty annoying watch. It makes it all the more baffling when the movie tries to have a heart when it’s surrounded by shit like Jay sucking off a tiny blunt penis.

I’m sure Smith took a lot of inspiration for this movie from witnessing Jason Mewes become a father to his new daughter and how that changed him (Mewes’s daughter Logan also appears in the film.) Mewes taps into these emotions in the film itself, and though he’s not the most versatile actor, he manages to sell the moments he needs to well enough. Likewise, Harley Quinn also does alright. Her long monologue in the van about missing her dad where she first starts to cry is a little community theater-esque, but she started to grow on me as the movie went on. She’s known Mewes her entire life, he’s basically like her uncle, so that real-life affection between the two of them definitely helped bolster the relationship. I remember being oddly affected watching it in the theater, but rewatching now, I was feeling really bored pretty quickly. It was a bold move for Smith to try to wrench an emotional core out of a fucking Jay and Silent Bob reboot movie, and I give him points for trying, but I just don’t know how well it really pays off. Old Jay is too much of an unexplored cartoon character for me to invest that much in him being a good dad. I don’t even know where this guy lives, how is he going to support a daughter?

Arriving at Chronic-Con, Jay and Silent Bob run into Diedrich Bader, who played a security guard in Strike Back, so they can recreate the chase scene from that movie too, this time in a convention rather than a movie studio. They race through panels for AMC’s Comic Book Men and a reunion of Clerks, where all the actors are in black-and-white, which is kind of a cute gag, but now this has truly become ground zero for in-jokes, where Chronic-Con is less pop culture expo and more a Kevin Smith-centric extravaganza. Jay and Bob ultimately run into Holden McNeil and Alyssa Jones. Alyssa is adapting Holden’s “Chasing Amy” comic into a Netflix series (“It’s always a story that should have been told from a queer perspective, or a woman’s perspective, or any other person’s other than a cis white man’s.”) More importantly, Holden tells Jay and Bob he was the sperm donor for Alyssa and her partner’s child, Amy (played by Jason Mewes’s daughter) and acts as a co-parent to her. Ben Affleck talking about how much being a father means to him is definitely the most emotionally successful moment in the movie, mostly because Affleck is a good enough actor to really sell it. A lot of Holden’s fawning over Amy is definitely Smith speaking through him of his experiences raising his daughter, making it even more emotionally authentic (“Now that all my childhood dreams have come true, that kid is just way more interesting to me.”) We then get a great line tying together the theme of the movie, a theme I wish was more explicitly felt throughout (“Kids are like our reboots. Another chance to tell a brand-new version of the same old story.”) Then when Jay and Bob leave, Holden spouts out some labored puns referring to his other movies (“They’re Gone, Girl. They’re on The Town. It’s just us! We’re the Just-Us League!“) God bless Affleck; as big a star, and now a director, as he’s got to be, he’s always willing to play ball for his old buddy’s bullshit.

It feels like the cameo and supporting roles in this are more random than those in Strike Back. Adam Brody and Dan Fogler are at Chronic-Con, for some reason? Chris Hemsworth appears as a hologram at the con, acting as a pay-off to the bit of Milly and Jihad talking about how fucking hot Thor is. It’s kind of cute, but not all that great, which kind of goes for most of the rest of the cast. Fred Armisen, who’s usually pretty funny in whatever he pops up in, is just a flatline as Jay and Bob’s ride-share driver who also has a side business of marketing tater tots to teenage girls. It’s so bizarre and unfunny, he gets this big chunk of dialogue about how someone took a shit in his backseat and it took him forever to clean it… Not very good. Even Kate Micucci, who I love in basically everything, is a miss here, as the irate Mooby’s employee Silent Bob shows the eggplant emoji to. Matt Damon pops up early in the movie as Loki in a cutaway gag, where he explains what happened after the events of Dogma, which is a labored build-up to a Bourne Identity pun, only saved by Damon’s enthusiasm over delivering such a terrible joke. Nothing really rises above an okay for me, and as much as I didn’t really enjoy Strike Back, at least it had some fun, inspired moments like the Good Will Hunting sequel or Wes Craven’s cameo.

Eventually we get Kevin Smith on stage to reveal a clip of the new “Bluntman” reboot, starring Melissa Benoist (who’s here since Smith directed a couple episodes of Supergirl) and Val Kilmer (who’s here for fifty bucks and a free lunch.) The audience goes nuts, including Jay and Silent Bob, so I guess it’ll actually be a crowd-pleasing movie? Or at least just appealing to Kevin Smith fans (SO META!) But Jay and Bob like it, so they have no reason to want to stop the movie, so how are we gonna resolve the plot now? Simple, with the dumbest third act reveal ever. Shan Yu is actually a Russian spy, in a turn that I can’t even call a twist. She had only spoken before softly and inaudibly into her personal recorder, apparently recording her own podcast (REFERENCE!) about American life for Chinese listeners, but now she talks with a ridiculously cartoony Russian accent. It’s even goofier than Natasha Badenov, it’s really bad. She goes on about Russia infiltrating all aspects of American life, and now they’re going to fuck up pop culture by assassinating Kevin Smith live at this convention… like, what is this? Is this some kind of bullshit Russiagate thing? (she mentions election interference, so it must be partly that.) Jay finally admits to Milly that he’s her father, which is really the point of the ending, but all this Russia stuff is just terrible. I think Smith just wanted to have himself threatened to be killed over his terrible movies and wrote backwards from there.

So then we get a Marvel reference where Silent Bob becomes “Iron Bob,” complete with shots of Bob within the helmet with all the UI interfaces all around him. This is the equivalent of him fighting with a lightsaber in Strike Back, so we can cross another pop culture marker off Smith’s bucket list, although that’s clearly not him in the suit (we do get a cringeworthy line from Smith upon seeing Iron Bob, “I can’t wait until they make him a Funko Pop!”) Everyone in the crowd gets into an enormous fight, Shan Yu gets knocked out, and it just descends into pandemonium for no real reason. Then Kevin Smith gives up writing any sort of declining action to wrap the scene up by having himself in the movie just narrate himself to the final scene: Jay, Bob, and Milly at the Quick Stop, with Jay giving his daughter life advice, and captivating her with all the crazy adventures he’d had in all the movies he’s been in. I don’t quite know how visitation works between Milly going from Colorado to New Jersey, but I guess it doesn’t matter. But she’s 18, is she going to go to college? What kind of life does she want to lead? It’d be nice to get some kind of hint about that kind of stuff. But whatever.

Like I said in the beginning, when I saw this in a theater filled with Smith fans totally on board for every reference and callback thrown in, I got kind of swept up in Reboot. Despite its incredible laziness and shameless pandering to its niche audience, there’s a simplistic sweetness to it that’s present in all Kevin Smith films, from a writer/director who knows where his bread gets buttered and is willing to bend over backwards any which way to make the fans happy. Jay and Bob initially lived on after Clerks II in the “Jay and Silent Bob Get Old” podcast, hosted by Smith and Mewes, and I would not be shocked if a decade or two down the line, we get Jay and Silent Bob in a retirement home croaking out their last “Snoogans” before they both die in hospice. I just don’t know if I can recommend Jay and Silent Bob Reboot unless you’re a hardcore Smith fan, which if you are, then you absolutely have seen it already and no way you’ve gotten this far through my negative review. At least Strike Back had some degree of novelty as a ridiculous feature-length in-joke, but Reboot is just a self-admitted regurgitation of that. Outside of the Chasing Amy mini-sequel, it doesn’t feel like any real new substance, be it emotionally or comedically, is being added on top of this already flimsy premise for a movie. This one’s solely for the truest of the true Kevin Smith believers, but sadly, I am but a mere defector.