The official sequel can make no effort to match the scruffy integrity of its 1994 forerunner, least of all an effort to match the black-and-white photography. Not that the forerunner set any sort of mark to shoot for, but at least it accepted its limitations and worked within them. The memory of it had already been well and truly sullied, however, by repeated appearances of Jay and Silent Bob, in particular, in Kevin Smith's subsequent work, and there was no going back from the self-cannibalizing commercialism of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. But go back Smith defiantly, desperately does, to torch the Quick Stop and to reposition his aging, thickening clerks behind the fast-food counter at Mooby's. Onward and upward, franchisewise. And ever outward, edgewise. Only nowadays Smith is trying to stay ahead of such multiplex mainstreamers as the Farrellys and the Wayanses. He has always had clearer ideas of how to be crude (new outer boundary of taste: "interspecies erotica") than of how to be funny, and his amateurish actors (Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes, Smith himself and his real-life wife, Jennifer Schwalbach) can only underscore the crudeness. Rosario Dawson, as the improbable manager at Mooby's, sticks out like a nail-polished thumb. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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