Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for Kevin Smith's 2001 film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
Thanks to the massive success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, shared universes are all the rage these days. Studios are attempting to put them together all the time; sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail and plans get scrapped. Kevin Smith was ahead of the game, because he already started crafting his own shared cinematic universe back in the early '90s. When the decision was made to set Mallrats in the same area as Clerks, to bring back the characters of Jay and Silent Bob, and have the Mallrats characters reference things we had previously heard about in Clerks, Kevin Smith's View Askewniverse was born. The universe continued to expand through Chasing Amy and Dogma, and with Smith's fifth film he reached what is basically his version of the MCU's The Avengers: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where characters from all of his previous movies show up.
As the title implies, Jay and Silent Bob (played by Jason Mewes and Smith himself) are the stars this time, and them getting their own movie isn't something I would have expected when I first saw these guys standing outside the convenience store in Clerks. The seed for the story of Strike Back was planted in Chasing Amy, where comic book creators Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) and Banky Edwards (Jason Lee) were paying Jay and Bob likeness rights fees because their superhero characters Bluntman and Chronic were inspired by this weed peddling duo.
The film begins at the setting of Clerks, the Quick Stop convenience store and the neighboring video store RST Video. A prologue establishes that Jay and Bob have enjoyed hanging out in front of the block of stores ever since their mothers left them sitting outside the place in their strollers when they were infants (Smith's daughter Harley Quinn is baby Silent Bob.) Tired of having these guys around, store clerks Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) call the police and file a restraining order that forces Jay and Bob to stay 100 feet from the stores. When they go to the Brodie's Secret Stash comic book store to tell their Mallrats pal Brodie (Jason Lee again) about this tragic turn of events, Brodie drops a bomb on them: there's a Bluntman and Chronic movie being made, and they haven't received a "movie check" for this project inspired by them.
They make a visit to Holden, who isn't responsible for this because he sold Bluntman and Chronic off to Banky... but he does get Jay and Bob even more upset when he reveals to them that something called the internet exists, and on this internet there are trolls relentlessly bashing the Jay and Silent Bob of the Bluntman and Chronic comic book. These anonymous commentators aren't even aware that Jay and Silent Bob actually exist, but they take the comments personally anyway. That's the last straw. They have to stop this movie from being made.
To do that, they have to get to Hollywood. Those Dante, Randal, Brodie, and Holden cameos are packed into the first 12 minutes of the movie, and from that point on Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back becomes a road picture as we follow them on their journey from New Jersey to California. Their trip is complicated by the fact that they can't pay for transportation and Dogma established that they don't drive. So they decide to hitchhike.
Having Jay and Bob as the leads allows this movie to have a much sillier, more over-the-top sense of humor than any of the previous movies. Their antics in Mallrats were goofy, but this one goes even further. It's not quite on the level of the Clerks cartoon, but it is so cartoony that Jay and Bob even briefly catch a ride in the Mystery Machine with Scooby-Doo and the gang. There's also a scene where devils and an angel appear to Jay as he tries to make a moral decision, just like often happens in cartoons, but I'm sure that was a reference to Animal House.
Jay and Bob run into some interesting characters on the road, like George Carlin as a drifter who uses his mouth to get around the country, but the most prominent are a group of four women: Justice (Shannon Elizabeth), Sissy (Eliza Dushku), Chrissy (Ali Larter), and Missy (Smith's wife Jennifer Schwalbach.) They claim to be part of the Students Against Animal Cruelty organization and say they're going to sabotage a medical lab that conducts tests on animals, but that's actually a cover for a less noble criminal act they're planning to pull off near the lab. They need to dupe someone into sabotaging the lab for them as a distraction... and Jay and Bob are easily duped. Especially Jay, since he falls in love with Justice at first sight and is talking marriage before anything romantic even happens between them. Justice feels bad about fooling this guy who sweetly calls her "Booboo Kitty F*ck", as she thinks he's "just so innocent" (and she may be the only person who has ever described Jay that way), but she caves when her cohorts insist.
After breaking into the medical lab, Jay and Bob end up with an orangutan in their care, which ties back to the ending of Mallrats, where we saw them walking down the road with an orangutan named Suzanne. Smith didn't have a story in mind when he threw that gag into Mallrats, but a few years later he wrote a limited comic book series that was set between Chasing Amy and Dogma and followed Jay and Bob on their road trip from New Jersey to Illinois, where they were searching for the fictional town of Shermer. The place where several John Hughes movies were set. During that trip, Jay and Bob met Suzanne the orangutan, and that comic book series was proven non-canon with the release of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which is partially an adaptation of an issue of the comic story.
When faced with the med lab orangutan, Jay becomes paranoid that Suzanne is going to lead a ape takeover of the planet. Making it, you know, a Planet of the Apes. An image in this segment of the comic showed apes removing the head from the Lincoln Monument and replacing it with an ape head, an image that showed up in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake soon after - causing Smith to jokingly accuse Burton in the press of ripping off the comic book. Burton, the director of Batman and Batman Returns, a director who had recently been working on a Superman project at that time, responded that he doesn't read comic books... Regardless, Smith got to do some more Planet of the Apes jokes here as Jay imagines Suzanne and her fellow apes wreaking havoc. She quickly earns Jay's affection, though.
A major difference in this adaptation is the lawman who ends up on the trail of Jay, Bob, and Suzanne. In the comic he was clearly Tommy Lee Jones' character from The Fugitive, but here he's hapless idiot man-child Federal Wildlife Marshal Willenholly, played by Will Ferrell, whose movie career was in its early stages at that point. Marshal Willenholly's name is a combination of the three lead characters in the TV show Land of the Lost, and the character is a total buffoon. I wasn't sure about the casting of Ferrell when it was first announced, but he won me over with how funny his performance is. If you know me, it should be no surprise that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back remains my favorite movie with Ferrell in the cast.
It's during this part of the movie that Smith's penchant for referencing Star Wars reaches its pinnacle. Carrie Fisher shows up as a nun early in the movie, but once Jay and Bob find their way onto the set of the Bluntman and Chronic movie, which is being made in the style of the 1966 Batman series and is being directed by a character played by Chris Rock, Mark Hamill shows up as the villainous Cock-Knocker. And Jay and Bob have a lightsaber fight... of sorts... with him.
All of the storylines collide and get wrapped up in Hollywood. The quest to stop the Bluntman and Chronic movie (which stars James Van Der Beek and Jason Biggs as Jay and Silent Bob) or get a movie check from Banky. Willenholly's pursuit of the escaped ape Suzanne. Justice's love for Jay, which inspires her to betray the other girls. It's an exciting finale, which paves the way for a great epilogue that features some more cameos: producer Scott Mosier as his Clerks character Willam, Bryan Johnson and Walt Flanagan as Steve-Dave and Walt the Fanboy, Joey Lauren Adams and Renée Humphrey as sisters Alyssa (from Chasing Amy) and Tricia (from Mallrats) Jones, Dwight Ewell as Chasing Amy character Hooper, and at the very end, Alanis Morissette as her character from Dogma. God Herself.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is a great comedic adventure on its own, but it's also a joyous celebration of what the View Askewniverse had been up to that point. As a dedicated fan, I loved seeing characters from all of the movies showing up together. Watching this movie in the theatre when it was first released was like going to a party. And I went to see this movie several times - in 2001 I broke my theatrical viewing record with this one, watching it on the big screen six times. That record has since been broken and doubled, but back then six viewings was a big deal. My mom was with me for at least one of those viewings, and for another I was joined by my friends Noah and Micah. I think I inspired Life Between Frames contributor Jay Burleson to go see it as well.
This celebration was meant to be the end of the Askewniverse. Rather than saying Jay and Silent Bob will return in another movie, the note at the end of the credits in this one says "Jay and Silent Bob have left the building". God then literally closes the book on the Askewniverse... but Smith left himself a loophole. The fact that there are still pages in that Askewniverse book beyond the point where God closes it. It's a good thing he did have that loophole, because even though there hasn't been much action in the Askewniverse over the last eighteen years (not always for lack of trying), he has returned to this universe since 2001 and plans on returning to it some more.
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