As someone who grew up loving movies in the 1980s, I can’t help but wonder if we’ll ever shut up about movies from the 1980s. Yeah, a lot of those movies were good. A lot of them also stank out loud. You could make both those statements about any decade for the last 120 years. (We’ll cut you some slack, movies from the 19th century — you were still figuring it out.) When, oh when will filmmakers finally move on and, just for a change of pace, make some cinematic love letters to the summer “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “From Justin to Kelly” came out?
Not today, that’s for sure. “The 4:30 Movie” is a nostalgic throwback to the sleepy summer of 1986, when teenagers watched wrestling religiously, made ironic predictions about the Mets never winning the World Series, and spent all day at the movies jumping from theater to theater. The mission was simple: Buy one ticket to a film rated G, PG or PG-13 and then sneak into all the R-rated sex comedies and horror movies you could find.
“The 4:30 Movie” stars Austin Zajur (“Clerks III”) as Brian Dvid, a high school junior and big movie nerd who just asked his sophomore crush Melody (Siena Agudong, “Resident Evil”) to see an R-rated comedy called “Bucklick.” In case you were wondering, “Bucklick” is about a funny detective who … look, it’s “Fletch,” OK? They’re going to go see a fake movie version of “Fletch.”
Anyway, Melody can’t get off work until the afternoon, but she says she’ll meet Brian for — wait for it — the 4:30 movie.
Brian and his dweeby friend Belly (Reed Northup) and his ladies man friend Burnie (Nicholas Cirillo) go the theater early and plan to see three movies in one day: “Bucklick,” “Dental School” and the year’s biggest box office hit, “Astroblaster and the Beavermen” (these are the jokes). What should have been a typical day of theater-hopping gets derailed over and over by the cineplex’s heel of a manager, Mike (Ken Jeong), who keeps kicking one or more of them out. Sometimes for sex crimes.
“The 4:30 Movie” is, let’s be fair, a very good idea for a movie. It’s a wacky comedy about best friends in a single location who shoot the shit and pine for love and joke about pop culture while one thing goes wrong after another. Kevin Smith helped invent this genre with “Clerks” and “Mallrats.” Changing the setting to a movie theater at a silly point in the past and celebrating the cinematic experience — it should be a lay-up. What could possiblalsdihf;aounwedofj go wrong?
Oh god, that typo means a lot, doesn’t it… a lot of things went wrong.
The simplest observation is that “The 4:30 Movie” simply isn’t funny — I counted the laughs, I got to three, and one of them was during the credits. The more important observations are about why it’s not funny. For one thing, Smith’s screenplay is sorely lacking in the zinger department (an usher says they’ll never make the “Star Wars” prequels, and again, these are the jokes). Smith isn’t building up to big laughs by setting up gags over time, nor is he pushing our boundaries with shock moments. The characters aren’t insightful or even hilariously off-kilter. They’re just dudes talking to each other about stuff.
Then again, “The 4:30 Movie” doesn’t set those characters up to be funny in the first place. Smith takes the film’s premise and plays it down, rarely exaggerating it to a wacky degree, so the stakes always seem low, even to his heroes. They’re trying to pull one over ol’ Manager Mike, but there’s no energy to their shenanigans and no oomph to his antagonism. They’re just sitting in their seats or standing around and waiting for Melody to get there for a lot of the movie, and when something “funny” does happen it just kinda sits there like those Junior Mints at the bottom of the box that congealed together and don’t want to come out.
The editing, also by Smith, is more concerned with capturing the vibe of a lazy summer day than conveying comedy or drama. Or anything else for that matter. So without a fine-tuned screenplay, appreciable conflict or any energy whatsoever, there’s just not much to hang onto, no expectations to subvert, and by extension no yuck-yucks.
That’s not to say that Smith’s latest is a total wash. The young cast understood the assignment, it’s only their textbooks that were wrong. Zajur has an admirable everyman quality, Cirillo has all the bluster a high school blowhard could possibly need, and Agudong seems effortlessly charming. They’re to be commended.
Smith also seems to have had a good time coming up with fake trailers for his fake movies, with sleazy titles like “Sugarwalls Nun,” and I won’t spoil the rest because there are only three of them. Sadly, I’d rather watch any of Smith’s fake movies than “The 4:30 Movie,” because at least they seem enjoyably weird.
What’s odd is that Smith exerted some real effort to make the fake trailers seem somewhat period-plausible, but when we watch scenes from “Astroblaster” it’s a halfhearted, half-written green screen experience with no such retro whimsy. This is, after all, an ode to the movies, so why is the biggest movie of the summer so bad? And how come nobody seems to notice or care, not even our film nerd hero?
“The 4:30 Movie” is, like all of Smith’s late-era movies, a film that looks like it was fun to make. This time that joy does not extend to those of us in the audience, but it’s impossible to deny that Smith’s friendly nature comes through. It isn’t a particularly good movie, or even a kinda good movie, but you just can’t get mad at it. It’s a little sweet. And a lot of meh.
