"Get your dictionaries out kids, the new Kevin Smith movie is here! Yes, from the same guy who brought us the verbose and entirely over-rated Clerks comes an even more callow and trite piece of cinematic refuse!" said the reviewer in the style of the characters of Mallrats.
"Perhaps all of my cronies are ignoramuses or maybe the institutional learning facilities in the state of a thousand lakes, Minnesota, are beyond compare, but all of Mallrats' characters speak incessantly in a way that is not only unnatural and forced, where every time one opens his/her mouth out comes a run-on stream of what my high school history professor called 'five dollar words,' but also inane, revolving around such topics as butts, feces, intercourse, comic books, and Star Wars. Not to say that those topics are unimportant but in the context of this film, they lose any inherent ability to hold one's interests."
I'm sorry, I can't keep up this charade any longer—I don't have a thesaurus big enough or enough space in CdC to try and imitate the even more verbose and garish dialogue. If you liked Clerks you're in for more of the same stuff. The acting goes up a notch in most cases but with lines as interminable and unbelievable as these, who can sound good? I'm sorry but no air-headed blonde bimbo I know uses the word "capricious." Smith should really consider including a glossary in his end credits.
Oh, I get it... Smith is trying that irony thing—kind of like the mobsters in Get Shorty where one would not expect them to have debates about diction and the use of the phrases "i.e." and "e.g." Oh, ha ha, I get it now...
Well, I'll tell you. It works in Get Shorty. It works in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. It doesn't work in Mallrats or Clerks. Sure, the little thing about the workers on the Death Star in Clerks was kind of funny but it was lodged between a series of other, unamusing, stories and "poignant" pontificating about plebeian life, that it kind of loses its punch. Think of Mallrats as the stories that weren't "funny" enough to make the cut in Clerks. Yes, it's that bad.
Sophomore slump? Can we use that as an excuse? No, I don't think so. Although the humor is sophomoric, Mallrats is just a lot more of the same as Clerks—more references to Star Wars, more characters that do a minimum of actions and more dialogue. Heaps of dialogue. Gosh, they talked so much that fifteen minutes into the movie I wanted to yell, "SHUT UP, SHUT UP, WILL YOU PLEASE SHUT UP!" at the screen. And there's nothing worse than an unpleasant and unsympathetic main character unless it's one who thinks he's really cool. I can see the character that Jason Lee plays being done by a young Steve Martin in a Cruel Shoes-style monologue where he and the audience would know how dumb the character sounded instead of being touted as "cool dude."
[Photo caption: Jason Lee—with his role of Brodie, Jason Lee comes in a close second as a first-time movie star we'd never like to see again. (In just a length behind Elizabeth Berkley.)]
Those familiar with the zine "Vamos" know of the Vamos Curse where every band they interview is destined to break up (still hoping Pat can manage to talk to Smashing Pumpkins soon). I hold my own theories of there being such a thing as the Film Threat Curse, where 99% of the movies they feature are destined to suck. With a track record boasting cover stories of Double Dragon, the unreleasable Fantastic Four, and Carnosaur, I tend to think this is true. So seeing Mallrats on the cover of the Dec. '95 issue just makes sense.
Film Threat announced that their cover story was "An FT Exclusive"—looks like they're right about that: every interview and press junket for Mallrats has been cancelled. It seems the studio started to get the idea that this movie was as bad as it is. Going back and trying to stomach the thirty pages of ass-kissing and praise in FT's exclusive after seeing the movie is hilarious and probably the funniest thing to come out of it.
I feel that I let you, the reader, down by not bringing a notepad to the movie so that I could keep track of all the outrageous vocabulary Smith has his characters use that aren't done so in normal conversation. Not even heads of state or English majors would throw around these Balderdash-rejects. Please forgive me.
I guess I could have summed this movie up in a one line review that would have been right in line with Mallrats' tone but not its overlong dialogue: "The only person in the theater that laughed was this retarded girl who giggled at Michael Rooker's bare butt." In the words of the immortal Stan Lee (who also prostitutes himself here), "'Nuff said?"
Perhaps something good will come out of this whole disaster—maybe people will go back and re-evaluate their opinion of Clerks and realize that it was just as bad as this movie and maybe they were just caught up in all the MTV commercials.