JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK

“A Jay and Silent Bob movie?” asks Ben Affleck, looking quizzically into the camera. “Who would pay to see that?” Given the extreme critical polarity Kevin Smith engenders, we’ll see. But in this critic’s opinion, Smith’s latest and ostensibly last J&SB flick is a corker. Its scope and production values are bigger and better than those of his last outing, Dogma, but its humor isn’t encumbered by that film’s ponderous theological parsing. Neither is it tempered with the over-earnestness of Chasing Amy or ruined by the pointlessness of Mallrats. It’s just a gleefully stupid, over-the-top cross-country romp populated with a ton of familiar faces and marked by a genial, if prurient, charm.

When the duo discover that the comic book they’ve inspired is due for a big-screen treatment, they’re less angry that they’ve been cut out of the deal than that posters on www.moviepoopshoot.com are slandering the film — and them — in advance of its release (“Fuck Jay and Silent Bob up their stupid asses,” writes “MagnoliaFan”). This won’t stand. They post a warning to their anonymous antagonists (“We’re gonna make you eat our shit, then shit out our shit, then eat your shit, which is made up of our shit, which we made you eat”), then head for Tinseltown to halt production and redeem their good names.

That follows doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, and that’s fine. It’s a road movie. It’s a buddy film. It’s a Hollywood satire (in which Smith chomps off the hand that feeds him, Miramax’s, with gusto). It’s got four Charlie’s Angel–type vixens in stretch black-leather suits. It’s got more mimed fellatio than you can shake a dick at. It’s got local boys Ben and Matt in Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season. It’s got Luke Skywalker as a shock-haired villain named Cock Knocker. It’s got an orangutan. And it’s got Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) themselves. The former’s hyperkinetic scatological rifflng has been re ned to zen-like perfection; the latter speaks scarcely a word, but his eyebrows should be nominated for some kind of Oscar. I’d pay to see it again. At Clarks Pond, Falmouth, the Nickelodeon, Auburn, Biddeford, Brunswick, Chunky’s-Sanford, Chunky’s-Windham, Lewiston, Oxford, Saco, Wells, Barrington, Newington, the Strand, and Salisbury.

— Mike Miliard