Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)

Kevin Smith's eighth trip through the View Askewniverse arrives as a hall of mirrors: two aging stoners drive cross-country to prevent Hollywood from rebooting the comic-book property that bears their names. The joke is that the film itself is the reboot it mocks, and Smith knows it, and says so, repeatedly, for ninety minutes. The target is the corporate appetite for recycled intellectual property, and Saban Films is duly installed as the villain, which is a tidy bit of anti-corporate needling that never quite escalates into an argument about money or labor. It is satire aimed at the hand that feeds, delivered with a wink and a merchandising table.

The supporting cast has grown more varied in the intervening two decades, though the film treats this as texture, not thesis. Sopapilla is deaf and swings a hockey stick at the climax; Jihad and Shan Yu round out the crew; Justice has married a woman named Reggie and raised Jay's daughter without him. Holden McNeil has donated sperm to Alyssa Jones and her wife and helps raise the child. These arrangements are presented as ordinary facts of adult life, unaccompanied by applause or explanation. A Ku Klux Klan rally gets a portable toilet thrown at it, which counts as political engagement of a sort, though the sequence is staged for slapstick.

Absences are as instructive as presences. There is no weather, no carbon, no climate anxiety. Nobody discusses body image. Sopapilla's deafness is a punchline and a plot device, never a question of neurology or accommodation. History goes unrevised, since the film's only past is its own filmography. Sentiment remains: Jay learns he would rather be a father than a brand, and Smith's dialogue briefly stops joking to say so. The sermon is short. The film returns quickly to dick jokes and cameos, which is, on balance, the honest choice for a movie whose entire argument is that it should not exist.