“JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT” by KEVIN SMITH Premiering this Week

Before Disney tried it with their (then-recent) acquisition Marvel, and then Warner Bros. with their own comic-book subsidiary DC, a certain filmmaker has already toyed with the concept of several different films that somehow share the same universal setting and is connected by a number of common characters appearing in all of them. That was Kevin Smith, and the characters are Jay and Silent Bob (played by Smith himself). Two hilarious drug dealers who have shown up from “Clerks” (1994) to “Chasing Amy” (1997) to their own self-title sequels and more, these characters created by Smith are set to return one last time in cinemas, to stop their own reboot.

That, goes USA Today, is the premise behind Kevin Smith’s upcoming comedy “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot,” from his View Askew Productions and Miramax, premiering this week. It is seemingly a meta-textual treatment on the concept of the questionable-comedy duo, portrayed by Smith and longtime collaborator Jason Mewes, where they lose legal rights to their own names and must head to Hollywood to stop the reboot of a movie with their names featured. The interesting fact about the film was how it came together for Smith following a life-threatening experience.

Smith had vacillated in past years over whether or not he would direct a new film in the “Jay and Silent Bob”-verse, the last entry of which being “Clerks II” in 2016. The “Reboot” movie finally was announced in 2017 but the start of filming kept getting put off, until Smith suffered a heart attack in February 2018 that doctors noted had 80% mortality for him. That spurred the filmmaker to kick up production, one of his reasons being that he did not want his last film to be “Yoga Hosers” a 2016 horror-comedy. It flopped mightily and is considered the worst in Smith’s filmography.

“Jay and Silent Bob Reboot” also has the makings of a family endeavor for Kevin Smith as well, considering that one of his talents/costars is none other than his own 20-year-old daughter, Harley Quinn Smith. Ironically, her character in the movie is the daughter of Jay rather than her real-life dad’s Silent Bob. She does get another shout-out of a name in being called Milly Faulken; her full first name being Millennium. It should be recalled that she did debut in 2006’s “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” playing her father’s character as a baby.

The movie, which also stars Aparna Brielle and Shannon Elizabeth, premieres on Tuesday, October 15.

Image courtesy of MovieWeb