Slowly inching towards something close to cinematic maturity with "Chasing Amy" and "Dogma", Kevin Smith seems to have gotten frustrated and given up, resulting in "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back", a wobbly, disappointing entry into Smith's filmography that plays to all of his weaknesses, and ignores the few strengths he ever had as a filmmaker. Glutted on a budget of ten million dollars and a thick rolodex of Hollywood friends, the movie adopts the uneven form of the Road Movie early on, and does its damndest to stuff as many pop culture references as it can (a large majority of which revolve around Smith's own pop culture creation, the `View Askewniverse') into its hundred minute running time. This would be fine if the movie could somehow find a balance between a coherent narrative and the rapid-fire string of gags, but it never does, and the smirking inanity that Kevin Smith has always prided himself in finally begins to seem gratuitous. As the titular duo, Jason Mewes and writer-director Smith's journey from Red Bank, New Jersey to Hollywood, California (on a mission to stop the production of a Miramax movie about characters that are based on their own pot-smoking existence) often seems like what it very well may be: the most irresponsible possible edit of itself. Although it contains a bear's share of rewarding sequences for Smith's die-hard fan base, subplots and secondary characters are either given way too much screen time or not enough, with an almost tactical emphasis placed on what's most unimportant. Many may be quick to forgive the basic fundamental mistakes Kevin Smith has made here in exchange for a few cheap laughs, but I believe that any movie that wastes the presence of both George Carlin *and* a reasonably well-trained orangutan is simply unforgivable.
Review of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
