BEFORE: I've been hearing about these "flights to nowhere", which are a desperate play by the airlines to make some money at a time when hardly anybody is traveling - I think the main one is in Australia, it takes off from Sydney, flies around the country for seven hours and then lands back in Sydney, thus not spreading any COVID-19 to another city or country. Really, it's all the things that many people hate about flying - cramped space, shared air, a non-zero chance of being in a plane crash - without any of the benefits, like going somewhere and accomplishing something by visiting another city. I'll put up with the downsides of traveling on a plane if there's something waiting for me at the other end, like a cruise or a week in Vegas, but I'm just not seeing the upside of getting on a plane and enduring turbulence and leg cramps for seven hours just to fly over a couple tourist attractions and not really visit them. Yet these flights are selling out, which I think is an indication of just how desperate people are to get out of the house and just pretend that things are back to normal for a few hours, when they clearly are not.
But I wish I'd thought about these flights to nowhere a couple days ago, because they would have been a great metaphor for "Drunk Parents" - that storyline similarly circled around for a few hours and never really got anywhere. I'm hoping for better results today, with a new (OK, from last year, but new to me) film from Kevin Smith, and man, it's been a while. I endured both "Tusk" and "Yoga Hosers" back-to-back a couple years ago, and they did not score well according to my very non-scientific system. Again, maybe better results today, hope springs eternal.
This is one of those films with a HUGE cast, dozens of cameos, it looks like - which is part of the reason it's been scheduled several times already this year, but since it's the Year of the Re-Schedule, I didn't really mind moving it if I thought it could fulfill a better linking need a little further down the road. With so many actors in it, it could fit in many different places, and I think by putting it HERE it's helping me out of something of a linking jam, so it makes sense to put it where it has the most value. Without it I simply can't connect the September chain I wanted to the start of my horror chain, I think that will be evident in just a couple of days, when you see how I get from here to there. Putting this between two other films with, say, Ben Affleck or Molly Shannon in them would have felt like a waste, or at least a mis-step.
Plus, my wife and I watched "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" together, years ago, so I gave her a couple of chances to watch the sequel with me, once I realized it was on AmazonPrime. And she passed, again and again - but she's funny that way, I'll watch every film in a franchise long after they've started to go downhill, and she would rather just keep the memory of the first film in a series, if it was good, and not risk ruining that with an inferior sequel. She's probaby right to do so - but if this Reboot film is any good, I can at least bring that to her attention tomorrow.
Joe Manganiello carries over from "Drunk Parents".
THE PLOT: Jay and Silent Bob return to Hollywood to stop a reboot of the "Bluntman and Chronic" movie from getting made.
AFTER: Jeez, how long has it been since "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back"? That film precedes my blog's existence by eight full years - that was close to Will Ferrell's first movie role, wasn't it? (OK, it was more like his tenth, but his star was still on the rise.). That film came out in 2001, and Kevin Smith's directed like 7 other films since then, including "Clerks II", and he's directed episodes of "Flash" and "Supergirl" and produced a bunch of other TV shows that I don't watch. But he keeps coming back to this shared universe of his films, the only problem being that it has to include films like "Dogma" and "Chasing Amy" that diverged from the central storyline quite a bit, so as a result there are actors he's used again and again that now have to play multiple roles, and the fans are then asked to just ignore this, which isn't possible. (Remember when Jason Lee had to play both Brodie AND Banky in "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back"? And nobody noticed that those two characters looked alike? Just wait, it gets worse...)
Here, Jay and Silent Bob find out that the "Bluntman and Chronic" franchise is going to be re-booted, so they go see Brodie so they can find out just what a re-boot is. They learn that's when Hollywood makes the same movie over again, only with just enough changed so that you have to pay for the same shit again. Then they're off to Hollywood on a quest to stop the movie from being made, which is basically the same exact plotline from "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back", only just enough has been changed here so that we all have to pay for the same shit again. Hmm, I can't tell if this movie is aware of its own irony or not - either Kevin Smith is clueless, or guilty of the same sins as the other franchise directors, and I'm not sure which is worse. He's got to be in on the joke, right? But then he's just repeating himself, or the whole franchise is coasting on fumes, and neither of those is good. It's like "Star Wars" telling us we have to watch the heroes blow up yet ANOTHER Death Star, even if it's not called that.
The guilty party here, the man who's poised to destroy the "Bluntman" franchise, is Kevin Smith - so now HE has to play two roles in this reboot - which is only a reboot by HIS own rules, really. For most reboots, that means some kind of total re-invention or re-casting, so this isn't a re-boot, it's just a rehash, or standard sequel. Because at least they change everything around for a re-boot, this is just the same story, only without Will Ferrell. And they check in on how all the secondary characters from all the other View Askew movies are doing now, and people are co-parenting with their gay exes while learning from their toddlers and going vegan and eating healthier and trying not to just hang out in front of the Quik Stop dealing drugs all day. But at the same time, they're all smoking more weed than ever - maybe that's just Jay and Silent Bob.
The goal is the same - get to Hollywood in under five days, to stop a movie based on them from being made - which you might be able to do in a van if you do nothing but drive, don't stop for sleeping or any other distractions. But OF COURSE they stop for distractions, so therefore the drive is impossible. So is getting tickets for Chronic-Con on such short notice, but of course they find a way to do that, too. Ben Affleck plays the magical comic-book writer with badges for everyone who also makes veiled references to playing Batman while giving us life lessons about raising kids. (BARF!). Meanwhile Matt Damon is reduced to a quick cameo who makes veiled references to playing Jason Bourne while narrating the journey west and talking about being the angel from "Dogma". (Again, Kevin Smith plays himself, a guy who debates whether he should cast his talentless daughter in a movie while giving us life lessons about eating healthier to avoid heart attacks.)
In the last film that focused on Jay and Silent Bob (who are really the C3P0 and R2d2 of the View Askewniverse, if you think about it - only they don't make "Star Wars" movies about the droids) they hooked up with four women who pretended to be animal rights activists, but were really diamond thieves, or something, and all that slowed down the mission, but was at least interesting. The big difference in this film is perhaps that our heroes travel in a similar van but with four very different women, an ethnically diverse and partially handi-capable group of teens who met in a chat-room for girls who grew up without fathers (hint, hint) and somehow feel that appearing in a crowd scene in the "Bluntman and Chronic" reboot will go a long way toward alleviating their various long-standing emotional problems resulting from their past traumas. Umm, it won't. But hey, look how woke our franchise is now!
For extra liberal bonus points, the group of girls plus Jay and Bob take down a pedophile and the Klan - softball targets if ever there were any. (Is this "Drunk Parents" or "The Blues Brothers"?). Is it OK to beat up a pedophile and take his van? Is it OK to take down a Klan rally with the Alec Baldwin speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross"? Does that even make sense? And how does this get us any closer to Hollywood? I suppose it makes more sense than hiring an Uber driver to take them cross-country, but really, not by much.
The good news is that things do perk up once they finally make it to the convention - there's so much to make fun of at a big geek convention! (Or at least there was, back in the before times, when you could have a big geek convention...). Everybody at the convention is dressed like Jay and Silent Bob, so they blend right in, to the point of almost disappearing. And Kevin Smith/Silent Bob does a riff on that famous Marx Brothers routine from "Duck Soup" where two people who look alike make you think that somebody's looking in a mirror, when it's the look-alike seen through an open door. Can't beat the classics, really, all you can do is rip them off. Here's where another zillion cameos come into play, too, from the reunited cast of "Clerks" to the reunited cast of "Chasing Amy" to the reunited cast of "Comic Book Men", which was one reality show that I never watched. You're also advised to stay away from this film if you don't know who played the lawyer in "Zack and Miri Make a Porno", just like if you didn't see "Ant-Man and the Wasp", you're not going to understand the jumping-off point in "Avengers: Endgame".
Look, I've been doing this a long time, I've seen sequels, prequels, remakes and reboots. I've seen sequels that were also prequels, remakes that were also sequels, prequels that were also reboots. But I guess I've never seen a sequel pretending to be a reboot but that was really a remake. So, that's...something? I can't even tell, because I'm still thinking about that flight to nowhere, and in its own way, this is that - it gets off the ground, sure, but then, really it's almost got no place to go. Well, OK, it definitely goes somewhere, but it's no place new, and then it lands back at the same airport, so what was the point, except to kill a few hours when we've got nothing better to do?
I really wanted to like this film, because I'm a fan of what Kevin Smith has accomplished, he created a whole universe where many different stories can be told, so he should be up on a level with Stan Lee, George Lucas and Stephen King. But he's not, because something seems to be holding him back and making him unmotivated. (Gee, I wonder what...). Also, he needs to remember how to be funny, it seems that heart attack made him just a bit too serious. And the jokes he tells are still racially charged - you just can't cast a diverse cast and then STILL make fun of their ethnicities, because then you've negated the mitzvah. Dude, this is your universe, you're like its God, and you just want to keep doing the same plotlines and the same jokes, over and over? (Oh, sorry, you threw in some references to "The Shape of Water" and "Justice League", have a damn medal.). I'm glad you survived your heart attack, but maybe that should have been a wake-up call to make something new and positive instead of the same old tired story.
Also starring Jason Mewes (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Kevin Smith (allegedly last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Harley Quinn Smith (last seen in "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"), Shannon Elizabeth (last seen in "Love Actually"), Aparna Brielle, Jason Lee (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Joey Lauren Adams (last seen in "Big Daddy"), Jennifer Schwalbach Smith (also last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Brian O'Halloran (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Treshelle Edmond, Alice Wen (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Craig Robinson (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Frankie Shaw (last seen in "Dreamland"), Justin Long (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Donnell Rawlings, David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Bird Box"), Chris Jericho (last seen in "MacGruber"), Kate Micucci (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Diedrich Bader (last heard in "Superman: Unbound"), Melissa Benoist (last seen in "Danny Collins"), Val Kilmer (last seen in "The Snowman"), Tommy Chong (last heard in "Zootopia"), Ben Affleck (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Matt Damon (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Fred Armisen (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Other People"), Ralph Garman (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "Rent"), Adam Brody (last seen in "Shazam!"), Dan Fogler (last seen in "Love Happens"), Mickey Gooch Jr. (last seen in "The Clapper"), Joseph D. Reitman (last seen in "Money Monster"), with the voice of Stephen Root (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor")
and cameos from Jason Biggs (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), James Van Der Beek (last seen in "Downsizing"), Method Man (last seen in "Paterson"), Redman, Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Robert Kirkman, Keith Coogan, Stan Lee (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Marilyn Ghigliotti, Ernie O'Donnell, Scott Schiaffo, John Willyung (last seen in "Chasing Amy"), Walt Flanagan, Bryan Johnson, Ming Chen, Mike Zapcic, Chris Wood, Jesse Rath, Ben Gleib, (last heard in "The Book of Life") Brian Quinn, Marc Bernardin, Jake Richardson (last seen in "Clerks II"), Nick Fehlinger, Johnny "Bananas" Devenanzio.
RATING: 4 out of 10 Hater Totz
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