Inbred Kevin Smith comedy arranges a kind of get-together of the casts of his four earlier comedies -- Jason Lee, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Shannen Doherty, Joey Lauren Adams, Brian O'Halloran, etc. -- but with the titular slackers (Jason Mewes, disturbingly credible, and Smith himself, disturbingly not) brought in from the margin, where they had dwelled in all four, and situated instead front and center. The premise: they are on their way to Hollywood to derail a Miramax film based on their comic-book personas, Bluntman and Chronic, a project greenlighted without their consent, to say nothing of their profit-participation. En route, they fall in with a quartet of hot-bod cat burglars -- Charlie's Devils, as it were -- and one of them even falls in love with one of them, and (dream a little dream) vice versa. Some of the insiderism is accessible by general-interest film buffs (Gus Van Sant portrayed as too busy counting his money to be bothered with the nuts and bolts of directing a Good Will Hunting sequel), but that isn't to say it's funny: e.g., Ben Affleck, in a reprise of his Chasing Amy role, enthuses, "Ben Affleck is the bomb!" Much more of the insiderism, meanwhile, will be restricted to devout Smithians. (You know who you are.) The straightforward statement of our heroes' range of interests -- "weed, and dick-and-fart jokes" -- comes all too close to summing things up. The fact that Smith knows this, and that he lets us know he knows it, does not make it more commendable. It makes it less. With Shannon Elizabeth, Eliza Dushku, Ali Larter, and Will Ferrell. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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