Once one of the freshest and most promising voices to emerge from the American indie film boom of the 1990s thanks to such films as Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma, Kevin Smith has pretty much spent the last decade or so making increasingly tedious movies that have either seen him telling tales that have felt more like bong hit-inspired ramblings than actual stories (Tusk, Yoga Hosers) or tedious rehashes of prior glories (Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Clerks III). Like those movies, his latest work, The 4:30 Movie, is a disorganized and rambling mess that feels more like an excuse to get paid to screw around with a number of famous pals but unlike those films, it has just enough moments of interest to remind you of what made his work so appealing earlier in his career and to suggest what it might have been if he had put a little more effort into it.
Set in the summer of 1986, the film opens with movie-mad teen Brian David (Austin Zajur) calling up longtime crush Melody Barnegat (Siena Agudong), the first time he has spoken to her since badly misreading signals regarding getting to second base with her nearly a year earlier, and inviting her to go a see a movie that afternoon at the local multiplex with him. She accepts but things quickly grow complicated. For starters, the film they are planning to see—which, based on the mock poster and description, appears to be something along the lines of Fletch (a property that Smith was once slated to reboot)—is rated R, meaning that he and the two other pals coming along—oddball Burny (Nicholas Cirillo) and self-styled Lothario Belly (Reed Northrup)—need to purchase tickets for the lone PG-rated film showing and then hop from theatre to theatre until their movie starts without attracting the attention of the power-mad theater manager (Ken Jeong). For another, although Belly is always trying to position himself as the alpha teen of the group, he seems weirdly hostile and threatened by the fact that his friend would invite a girl—a sophomore, no less—to come along with them.
That first scene, in which Brian asks Melody out, is a real charmer that not only showcases Smith’s facility for writing zingy dialogue but also capture the roller-coaster intensity of emotions that will ring painfully true to anyone who remembers picking up the phone and calling up someone practically out of the blue to ask them on a date. Likewise, towards the end, there is another extended scene between Brian and Melody where they walk around town and talk about the movies they love and the dreams they have of their futures that is equally lovely in terms of both the writing and the performances from the two young actors. These are among the best moments that Smith has ever put on film—funny, poignant and incisive in its observations of how young people interact—and if the whole film had been like them, the result might have been something like his own version of Barry Levinson’s Diner.
Unfortunately, the hour or so of screen time between these two sequences is a mostly tedious affair that finds him lazily reaching into his all-too-familiar bag of tricks that even his ardent fan base must be tiring of by this point. There are the requisite number of puerile sex jokes and gross out moments (perhaps not as many as usual, though still enough to give the film its own R rating) and countless pop culture references, mostly involving people making incorrect predictions about what the future holds (including the beliefs that no one will ever pay to see a Batman movie in the theatre and that Bill Cosby will always be a beloved icon). There are glimpses of some of the various movies and trailers playing in the theater, including a spoof of the Angel movies with Smith’s daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, playing a nun who moonlights as a hooker and one that makes gruesome good on the unfulfilled promise of the poster for the old Empire Pictures chestnut Ghoulies. Although some of these bits are undeniably amusing (the faux-Angel trailer is very funny), they too often allow Smith to fall back on the lazy habits that have sadly dominated his recent films.
There are other problems as well. The pacing of the film is fairly sluggish at times as too many scenes run too long for their own good and there are a number of running gags that don’t really amount to much. While all four of the young actors at the forefront are good, the script never really figures out a way to make Brian’s two pals into actual characters instead of clunky plot devices—the film begins to sag whenever they take center stage. There are also plenty of cameos to be had as well from such familiar faces as Rosario Dawson, Kate Miccuci, Justin Long, Jason Biggs, Jason Mewes, Jason Lee, Adam Pally and Rachel Dratch. Most of these are of the blink-and-you-miss-it variety and prove to be more distracting that amusing, giving the film the aura of an expensive home movie with the guy from American Pie instead of your Uncle Fred. That said, the most surprising of the bunch comes from Genesis Rodriguez, playing a Hot Usher (that is how her character is listed in the credits) who declares her love for John Boorman’s crackpot masterpiece Exorcist II: The Heretic, making her the sanest and wisest character on display by far.
As a whole, The 4:30 Movie doesn’t really work—it is silly and undisciplined in a manner that suggests a lesser John Hughes movie and even at a slight 87 minutes, it drags at times. However, the scenes that do work—particularly the opening and closing sequences—are so captivating and funny that you will find yourself wishing that Smith could have given us more moments along those lines and kept the poop jokes and Poltergeist II references to a minimum. That said, this is easily the best thing he has done since Red State (the last film where he actually seemed involved in telling a story than in throwing a party for his pals on the screen and in the audience) and while I cannot recommend it, perhaps it will inspire Smith to try to figure out a way to create an entire screenplay along the lines of its best moments and once again demonstrate the genuine flair for storytelling and character that he seemed to have abandoned.