Movie Review: Mallrats 2 Stars

I like Kevin Smith. I really, really want to like Kevin Smith’s movies.

Take Mallrats, the story of Brodie (Jason Lee) and T.S. (Jeremy London), two suburban New Jersey slackers who were dumped on the same morning by their respective girlfriends, Rene (Shannen Doherty) and Brandi (Claire Forlani). Seeking solace in the local mall, they discover that Brandi’s dad (Michael Rooker) is planning to pimp her on his game show Truth or Date and Rene is dating Brodie’s mortal enemy Shannon (Ben Affleck), a salesman at Fashionable Male. Enlisting Silent Bob (Smith) and Jay (Jason Mewes), Brodie and T.S. plan to disrupt the game show taping and, in the process, win back the love of their ex-girlfriends.

Kevin Smith’s movies feel as though a dipsh*t high school kid and all of his dipsh*t high school buddies got together to shoot a film about the rest of their dipsh*t high school buddies. He and his dipsh*t high school buddies seem to be having so much fun making his movies, living out boyhood comic book Star Wars rock-n-roll fantasies. As sort of a low-rent John Hughes, Kevin Smith’s movies work.

But when Kevin Smith decides he’s a writer, unfortunately he grows up, becomes an adult and everything goes all to hell. His dialogue becomes monologues, crammed with too many references, not enough jokes, and the world’s most unnatural sentence structure. As a director, it’s a given that he sucks; he casts his dipsh*t high school buddies and their dipsh*t professional actor counterparts and he has yet to figure out that a camera can indeed move.

But the truth is, Kevin Smith is really just an AV dork who was handed a million dollars
to make the kind of movie that AV dorks would want to watch. Maybe that’s
why I want to like this movie so much -- the spirit is so sincere. But, just like in high school, no matter how pure your spirit is, if your team sucks, you’re not going to regionals.