Mallrats (1995)

Mallrats arrived in 1995 as the second entry in the View Askewniverse, a designation that carries weight only among those who keep such ledgers. Kevin Smith's script deposits two freshly dumped young men in a New Jersey shopping mall, where they scheme to recover their girlfriends, disrupt a dating game show, and enlist a pair of loitering drug dealers to wreck a stage. The mall functions as a playground and a stage set, never as an indictment of consumer appetite. There is no argument to be made here about capital, only a food court and a great deal of standing around.

The film's comic engine runs on material that would now require several pages of content warnings and a public apology. A woman dies of an embolism after 700 laps in a swimming pool, a death triggered by a remark about her weight, and the film treats this as setup. A fifteen-year-old conducts field research on male sex drive and films the results. A fortune teller works topless and possesses three nipples. A statutory rape is the punchline that resolves the third act, and the villain's imprisonment is capped with a joke about his own assault. Anyone hoping for a lesson will wait in vain. The movie has no interest in instructing its audience about anything.

As a piece of casting, the film is a document of its moment: uniformly white suburban New Jersey, presented without remark or curiosity. It offers no engagement with race, sexuality, gender politics, environmental concern, disability, or the historical record, because it never sets out to engage with any of them. What remains is a shaggy, occasionally funny comedy that Ebert greeted with a star and a half and that has since accumulated a devoted following anyway. We classify it accordingly. A sequel has been discussed for a decade and remains, fittingly, a matter of standing around the mall waiting for something to happen.

{"thematic_tags": []}