The problem with The 4:30 Movie is it’s too busy winking at itself with an overload of The Chris Farley Show‘s “Hey, remember when…” pop culture nostalgia as well as a foolish mockery of things to come. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It might seem funny for people in 1986 to say a Batman movie would never work or how the prequels to Star Wars won’t happen.
Yet, it’s not funny. Part of the problem is these types of jokes have been done over and over that I just want to groan when it happens in a movie. This is the latest movie by Kevin Smith and it could’ve been a great coming of age movie about teens in the mid-1980s, except the three main characters lack the John Hughes-style feel that Smith is obviously going for. Even if he’s trying to make an anti-John Hughes 1980s teen movie, it still doesn’t work.
Mainly, Smith already did it with Mallrats. That movie wasn’t as well received on its initial release but became a favorite or high schoolers and college frat boys. It’s also to easier forgive Smith for his sophomore feature following Clerks. It’s also the first movie Smith seem to make for the people rather than the critics, which is what I think Chasing Amy was, at the end of the day.
This is obviously an attempt by Smith to also touch on how Richard Linklater relived his youth in Dazed and Confused. Except the brutal irony of that movie is that Linklater was actually mocking the naivete of high school youth. We all had someone like O’Bannion, played by Smith’s constant collaborator Ben Affleck, a snobby hardass that no one really liked but always seemed to hang out with. Or there’s someone like Matthew McConaughey’s pathetic Wooderson, the 20-something who never really moved on and thinks having his own apartment makes him cool.
When one of the character’s gullibility showed as she said the 1970s sucked while the 1960s were awesome, so that means the 1980s will be righteous, Linklater was showing how most youths hate the decade or era they live in but think the decade when they will be in their 20s will be wonderful. In many ways, most of the Baby Boomers from this era did have a great time in the 1980s just not the way they thought they would.
Most movies and TV shows set in the 1980s now are way too overboard with the fashion and nostalgia it’s become very pointless and cringe-inducing. Most writers and directors know they can’t look through this period with rose-collared glasses the way their elders did of their youth ignoring all the racism, sexism, misogyny and bigotry.
It’s set in suburban New Jersey mostly over the course of one summer day even though there is a reference to Hands Across America which was on May 25, 1986. Brian David (Austin Zajur) and his friends, Burney (Nicholas Cirillo) and Belly (Reed Northup), plan on doing a theater-hop which means you buy a ticket for one movie, then try to sneak into a movie at a later time after that one ends. They’re hoping to do this on three movies, Astro Blaster & The Beavermen, Dental School and Bucklick.
Brian is interested in a fellow teen, Melody Barnegat (Sienna Agudong), and invites her along to see Bucklick, a R-rated crime thriller at the 4:30 showing after she gets off work. But her mother wants her to eat dinner first. Burny doesn’t like it because it means they’ll have to see Dental School as their second movie after Astro Blaster. If you’re a fan of Smith movies, you know that Dental School has been referenced constantly in his works. I would suggest Smith try to make this movie as his next feature the way Richard Rodriguez and Eli Roth turned fake trailers into real movies. It can’t be any disappointing than this movie.
And there are fake trailers here, which are actually the highlights. Smith’s own daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, plays a vigilante nun in Sister Sugar Walls. I’m reminded of schlock movies like Ms. 45 in which a sexual assault victim turns vigilante and she wears a nun’s habit during one of her killing sprees. It also reminds me of movies like Angel and its sequel Avenging Angel which were crime exploitation movies about teen prostitutes. These were low-budget movies often shown in theaters back when they were more independently owned before the home video market took over.
Then there is a slasher style movie trailer The Health Nut, that claims to have been banned in many countries. There’s also another horror movie, Booties, in which Jason Biggs plays a construction worker who gets killed by a creature in a porta-potty. This is obviously a reference to the low-budget horror movie Ghoulies which famously featured demonic creatures in a toilet.
It’s just a shame the rest of the movie didn’t have the same humor these fake trailers did. It’s apparent Smith and his normal cast of actors had more fun making these as Jason Mewes plays a john who Sister Sugar doesn’t care for. But the inclusion of other Smith regulars such as Jeff Anderson, Jason Lee, Justin Long and a blink-and-miss shot of Brian O’Halloran don’t work. Even worse, Melody’s mother played by Kate Micucci is so annoying she makes the few scenes she’s in so terrible, you want to call CPS.
Also, Brian’s own mother (Rachel Dratch) adds nothing to the movie when she calls the movie theater to tell him he needs to give the cat a bath. She actually does an Emergency Breakthrough, something kids today won’t understand, but if you do, you probably should schedule a colonoscopy. But the scene serves no real other purpose but to do a “Remember when you could make an emergency call on a busy line?”
This could all be forgiven if the main characters were the least bit likeable. But they’re not. I never did feel that Zajur got how Brian was supposed to be. And Burny and Belly are too busy being caricatures of 1980s New Jersey stereotypes. In Clerks and Mallrats, Anderson and Lee respectively showed they were capable of being more than the protagonist’s friend. Speaking of which, there is a reference to the famous Quick Stop so this movie is set in the View Askewniverse.
Worse is how Ken Jeong overacts as the the movie theaters’ Manager Mike. This wild and crazy Asian persona might have worked back during the first Hangover and the early seasons of Community, but even the writers of that latter show knew they had to make him evolve. Jeong is capable of being funny when a good comedy director handles him which was the case in Knocked Up.
The 4:30 Movie feels like one of those fake trailers we see where there’s only about three or four minutes of good material.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 