Two-thirds of the way through writer-director Kevin Smith's self-stimulated Jay and Silent Bob Reboot the stagnant pair catch up with Ben Affleck's Holden and Joey Lauren Adams' Alyssa from Chasing Amy, the former lovers now co-parenting (along with Alyssa's wife) a child played by Jason Mewes' real life daughter. As expected, Holden looks older. His once buoyant hair has been trimmed short and his goatee is gone. He talks about his failed relationships, specifically an inability to make any lasting romantic connections. Also mentioned is the pain he's suffered in making himself the sole focus of his life and how that level of expectation has crushed him. Then Holden talks about fatherhood: the reassurance that comes with the certainty that somebody really and truly does love him. Smith's dense, motormouth dialogue - genuinely insurmountable for many of his actors - spills out of Affleck with a drilled ease. This extremely brief (but touching) interlude aside, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is an agonising, two-hour pummelling that is premised entirely on the implied goodwill that the filmmakers believe they inherit from a thirty-year deluge of Quick Stop material. As incurious as ever behind the camera, Smith boldly places himself out in front of house for several different roles. His performance as himself, a role lousy with cringing asides about how useless he is as a director, is irritating enough but his Silent Bob, classically portrayed as the taciturn alternative to his jackrabbit partner, has mouldered into an intolerable mime act with Smith's grimacing face twisted up into a series of painful-looking gurns.
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