Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Out of all of the View Askew characters/actors, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (director Kevin Smith) are my least favorite. Jay is an obnoxious, hormone-driven drug dealer who''s vocabulary basically consists of swear words, and while there really isn''t anything wrong with Silent Bob, he does spend all his time with Jay. Of course, they take up ninety percent of the screen time, but it isn''t as bad as I was expecting. In fact, writer/director Kevin Smith manages to turn Jay into a partially decent human without really changing the character. On the other end of the spectrum, my favorite View Askew actor, Jason Lee, gets a fairly small part in the movie, and his dialogue is nowhere as witty as in his other movies (Mallrats and Chasing Amy especially).

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back basically follows the duo across the country as they try to stop the movie version of Bluntman and Chronic, a comic book based on their personas, from being made. Along the way they encounter jewel thieves, an idiotic ranger, a romantic interest for Jay, and an orangutan. There are two problems with this: One, the movie is basically a cross-country adventure film similar at least in plot to many, many, many other movies, and is a lot less localized than Smith''s best movies, Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy (Dogma was less centralized and really not as great). Two, since the movie is basically about Jay and Silent Bob''s travels, we don''t get to see familiar characters as much as we''d like to. I would have liked to see several characters a lot more, and would have been willing to sacrifice some of the stupider scenes like the diamond heist and The Fugitive spoof.