Review of Mallrats (1995) by Scott W — 02 Dec 2009

The first of many, many Kevin Smith failures, "Mallrats" was rightly criticized upon its release for being a lazy, poorly-plotted retread of "Clerks" with a slick studio budget. The movie now has something of a cult following, possibly because time has a way of healing old wounds, possibly because Smith's fanbase is far more forgiving than I.

What's really strange about "Mallrats" is how little narrative sense it makes. Not just in terms of how implausible most of the plot is--and Lord, is it ever implausible--but just in the bare bones of what happens. Brody, as played by Jason Lee, is a complete asshole. When his girlfriend breaks up with him early in the film, it's hard to not want to take her side. Afterall, the reasons she gives are fairly valid. Brody doesn't change at all throughout the course of the film, yet he gets to have a heart-to-heart with Stan Lee, get his girlfriend back, and is given his own talk show on network television. There's no explanation for why any of this happens.

Even Smith's dialogue, which once seemed so fresh all of a year or so earlier, now seems to be running on autopilot. Remember that great Return of the Jedi discussion? Well, it's back, only now we're treated to a monologue about Superman and Lois Lane's reproductive organs. It's like he took the script to "Clerks" and did a find-and-replace to replace the words "Quick Stop" with "Mall" and then hastily threw in some crap about a gameshow once he realized that a movie about two people standing around and talking probably wouldn't go over too well with a major studio.

The greatest asset of "Clerks" is that it felt like less of a movie and more of a documentary. "Mallrats" is its polar opposite. It's a movie where the farmer's market would have a three-nippled fortune teller, where two stoners dress up as Batman in order to steal the schematics to the mall, where an evil mall employee would constantly harass the main characters for having "no shopping agenda," where a gameshow would be broadcast live without a time delay from a mall in suburban New Jersey. "Mallrats" isn't a movie. It's a fucking cartoon.