“Zack and Miri Make a Crummy Movie” Review

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I never saw “Jersey Girl.” It looked like writer-director Kevin Smith was trying something different, trying to grow as a filmmaker, trying to make another interchangeable bit of product instead of a Kevin Smith movie. There are some filmmakers who you don’t want to try new things, particularly when you know they’re not up to the task. Kevin Smith is fairly limited in what he can do, and with each new film he puts out, his limitations become that much more obvious. He’s struggled to broaden his audience for years. With “Jersey Girl,” he tried to make a safe, PG-13 rom-com. It bombed. And with “Zack and Miri [Make a Porno],” he’s trying to make a Judd Apatow film — a raunchy but surprisingly sweet sex comedy. That being said, I wish Kevin Smith would go back to making Kevin Smith movies again.

“Zack and Miri” is one of those films that you like less and less the more you think about it. When the credits started to roll, I thought it was an adequate time-killer. By the time I got home, I was on the verge of hating it. It’s not a terrible movie. I was able to wring some laughs out of it. But it’s so lazy, so uninspired, so bored with itself. Then it just sort of stops once Smith’s run out of unearned moments.

The film stars Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as the titular “Zack and Miri,” a pair of verbose underachievers — characters Smith can write in his sleep and probably did — who share an apartment and are way behind on their bills. They go to their high school reunion for an extremely overlong sequence, so Miri can try to hook up with an old crush (Brandon Routh, desperately hoping Warner Bros. greenlights “The Man of Steel” soon) but quickly finds out he’s gay — yawn. The whole saga of their encounter mercilessly goes on and on. Justin Long also appears as Routh’s gravelly-voiced lover and co-star in gay porn films. Meeting this pair ultimately inspires Zack to co-produce an adult film with Miri for some extra cash after their electricity gets shut off. That it took 30 minutes of tired banter and needless exposition to get to this point really goes to show how listless this movie is. Smith introduces several characters in the first act that we never see again, which makes you wonder in hindsight why we spent so much time on them. Hell, we never even find out why Miri’s high school nickname was “Stinky Linky.”

Once Zack and Miri finally decide to making a dirty movie, you’d think the film would find its — ahem — forward thrust. No, not really. We immediately fall back on Smith’s favorite motif, “Star Wars.” Zack and Miri — instead of shooting some cheapie amateur stuff, the stuff that’s all over the Internet — try to make one of those high-concept skin flicks with a funny title: “Star Whores.” “Star Whores?” Gerard Damiano is spinning in his grave. Thankfully, plot contrivances shut down Zack and Miri’s production before shooting starts. So Zack gets the bright idea to make the film after-hours in the coffee shop where he works. His endlessly patient and unpaid cast and crew go along with this because, well, they’re stuck in a Kevin Smith movie, where the script demands that they help prop up these two losers for the entire second act.

For whatever reason, Zack and Miri are acting in the movie as well. They’ve been friends for more than 20 years, and in that time, they’ve never been intimate. But giving them a sex scene together allows for the script to put the cart before the horse in terms of bringing their relationship to the next level. I like the idea conceptually. Still, their love scene is so dull and unromantic — a montage of them making nonplussed faces at each other while undulating fully dressed — it’s hard to believe that their coupling could spark much of anything, much less romance. Yet it does. Suddenly, they don’t want each other appearing in scenes with other members of the cast. Then they have a misunderstanding that could’ve been resolved with one sentence, but inexplicably, Zack walks off the film and moves out of the apartment.

The film simply doesn’t work. It feels phony, like one of the XXX movies Smith is sending up. As characters, Zack and Miri are so idealized, there’s hardly much of an arc for either of them. We spend 90 minutes waiting for these two goofballs to acknowledge that they love each other. So the hell what? Introducing porn in the equation would seemingly complicate matters in an interesting way, blending the physical act of love with the artifice of cinema, but Smith doesn’t have a nuance to pull it off.

I bet Judd Apatow could’ve.

-Brad Lohan

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