Michael Atkinson
And so it comes to pass that the Sundance indie generation of filmmakers, now mostly in their reflective 50s, have sometimes taken to limning their own rosily remembered pop-culture youths on film: Richard Linklater’s rather adorable Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022), Paul Thomas Anderson’s restlessly beguiling Licorice Pizza (2021), maybe even, in a sense, Quentin Tarantino’s more ambitious Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019), though you could say that QT’s entire career project has been an effort to re-inflict his teen years, as absorbed by his cine-manic eyeballs, on the world over and over again. Always the humble runt in this litter, Kevin Smith has been scraping the barrel of his North Jersey biography ever since Clerks (1994), and his new film, The 4:30 Movie, goes explicitly back to a specific mess of low-watt teenage crucibles: dating, sneaking into an R-rated film, shit-talking with bros.
To each his own nostalgia. I thought for a moment this movie might somehow be a paean to the old ABC-TV 4:30 Movie, a pre-cable weekday showcase of movies (the logo sequence was a post-2001 slit-scan silhouette of a cameraman on a crane) that would routinely trim a movie down to 60 minutes in order to fit it in with 30 minutes of commercials and wrap it up by six o’clock. (Or, alternatively, a longer film would be chopped up and run over a whole week — you’d start Lawrence of Arabia after school on Monday and finish on Friday, along with 2.5 hours of ads.) But no, Smith is going fondly back only as far as 1986, when he was 16 and the world boiled down to movies, girls, and buds. Simply put, Smith’s avatar, Brian (Austin Zajur), gets a date (rather easily) with scrumptious sophomore Melody (Siena Agudong) to see a new R-rated movie at the titular time — a plan that stretches into the evening, as Brian meets his friends (geeky Reed Northrup, stud loudmouth Nicholas Cirillo) to buy tickets to a dumb PG film, intending to switch and meet the girl later, and then endure or cause a dozen dumb things to happen, including outraging the cartoony theater owner (Ken Jeong) enough to get banned for life, twice.
If that synopsis made The 4:30 Movie sound at all interesting or competently executed, my bad: It’s a Smith movie, and the balls are thrown low. He’s always been the first to admit that he has horrible taste and knows nothing about filmmaking, but after 30 years behind the eyepiece now, it seems he has stubbornly, even heroically, insisted on remaining the clueless schlub he’s always been. If only he put as much effort into his screenplays as he does into his branding and self-marketing — even if The 4:30 Movie is intended as a parody of crummy ’80s teen comedies (the drum-machine-and-synth score tips in that direction), that still means the jokes are lame and their hollering deliveries are dead on arrival. Even the flash mob of guest stars/Smith cronies (Jason Lee, Rachel Dratch, Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Jason Biggs, Justin Long, etc.) can’t save their scenes; the only thing Smith nails is a convincingly Troma-esque movie trailer about a man-eating port-a-potty.
As with earlier Smith films, the comedy is flat but the romantic musings are sweet and even a little wise, and so, in the end, Agudong and Zajur emerge from the foolishness with a moment of warmth that feels almost earned, given what we’ve just sat through. Despite the movie’s dogged yet dim cinephilia, it’s better that they’re alone and not at the movies.