Director: Kevin Smith
Cast: Austin Zajur, Nicholas Cirillo, Reed Northrup, Siena Agudong
Have I Seen it Before: Never. It appealed to me more on spec than any Kevin Smith film since Clerks II (2006), and yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to go to the theater.
Did I Like It: When the film is about characters falling in love while trying to sneak into what is obviously, but legally distinct from Fletch (1985)*, it’s very possibly Smith’s most heartfelt, honest, and charming film. Kevin Smith’s got a good fifteen years on me, but I’ve got my own story about the slings and arrows of young love, and one of the ancillary pieces of trivia from that moment in time is a VHS copy of Chevy Chase’s best movie.
That would have been more than enough to sell the movie, but apparently it wasn’t enough to satisfy Smith. When the film is a shooting gallery for “reference to just how much a sacred cultural cow of the 1980s is viewed differently in the mid-2020s” it begins to become something groan-worthy. I leaned into a bit of a headache when Sam Richardson stops the movie cold to go on a little Bill Cosby rant. Not because Cosby doesn’t deserve it, but because there was more winking at the camera in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001).
Then there’s where the film really started to lose me, mostly in its final minutes. Plenty of people have probably moved on from the point where they were most into Smith’s work. So, a film that decides to unravel from being a lightly autobiographical romp to a full blown attempt to make Bluntman Begins. There’s an extended scene—after the main plot is exhausted, you’ll know it when you see it—where it is 100 percent clear the entire time what the reverse angle is looking at, even though you hope against all hope that Smith won’t go there. The scene goes on forever, just holding that other shot at a distance.
Then Smith goes there. Oh, well. I guess we’ll always have Fletch.
*Which, incidentally, was not rated-R, but these are minor quibbles.