I watched 'Mallrats' for the first time in 20 years.

A long overdue revisit of a Kevin Smith classic from my teenage years.

Here’s how much my friends and I loved Kevin Smith’s movies when we were teenagers. We had tickets to see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back on opening day in 2001. We were headed to the theater but my friend Derek made a wrong turn. So worried was he that this simple mistake might make us even a minute late for the newest offering of snoochies, he pulled a U-turn and started speeding back the other way. We were going so fast that, when a car tried turning in front of us, we couldn’t stop in time and got into a pretty bad collision. Thankfully, Derek was driving his grandmother’s indestructible Crown Victoria, a car designed specifically to make sure old people don’t get killed by their own terrible driving. The airbags deployed and when the loud noises stopped, we made sure we were all okay. We were, except for my girlfriend whose nose was bleeding. 

She insisted to the paramedics that she was fine, but because she was 17, they legally had to take her to the hospital for examination. I rode with her in the ambulance while Derek was given the more important task: Continuing on to the movie theater to ask if we could exchange our tickets for a later showing. Derek showed the manager the police report and was issued new tickets.

It’s hard to identify with the version of myself who literally risked his life to see a Kevin Smith movie. Smith has had his hands on dozens of projects over the last 20 years that I’ve never seen or even heard of. I probably wouldn’t pass a Which of These Is Not A Real Kevin Smith Movie? quiz at gunpoint. I still respect him. He has carved out a niche lane as the most knowledgeable nerd in Hollywood, and has built his own little cinematic world, and for that I tip my beanie cap to him. Plus, once in a while I find myself working a quote from Clerks: The Animated Series (still his single greatest creation) into daily conversation.

Constantly quoting movies is one of my most annoying qualities. I am That Guy and it is a terrible burden to my loved ones. It’s also, sadly, one of the things I’m most skilled at. It’s not just recent favorites like I Think You Should Leave or things I’ve been watching regularly since childhood, like The Simpsons. Sometimes I’ll rewatch a movie like The Burbs or Blankman for the first time since childhood and surprise even myself by what comes back to me like muscle memory. When Shelley Duvall died this year, I rewatched an episode of Faerie Tale Theater for the first time since I was four years old and was downright shocked by how many of the lines had apparently been just sitting perfectly intact in a box in my brain’s attic. It honestly scared me.

This all leads me to Kevin Smith’s second film, 1995’s Mallrats. There was a time when I loved this movie so much that its poster hung on my bedroom wall and I could quote it with the best of ‘em. But despite my teenage love for it, I had somehow not revisited it for the last 20 years. Probably longer than that, actually. Once a year or so, the thought would randomly hit me: I should give Mallrats a rewatch, but then I’d just go on living another year without doing so. It almost became a streak that I didn’t want to break.

The thought hit me again recently, which prompted me to reflect on what I actually remember about Mallrats. For a movie I watched a thousand times, it was surprisingly little. I remembered Jason Lee as he appears on the poster, but all the other characters were less defined in my mind. I remembered the third act where they’re at the game show, but the first hour was a bit hazy. Why were they at a game show? I couldn’t remember. I also couldn’t remember the characters’ names or the general plot or anything that “happens” in the movie. I couldn’t remember any other locations aside from the mall, if there were any.

So after decades of rewatch edging, I broke down last week and finally gave Mallrats the long overdue viewing it deserved. Here are a few stray thoughts.

• First and foremost, everyone in this movie is extremely hot. Some of the actors in it went on to battle drug addictions. Some are no longer with us. Some became Ben Affleck. But for the 94-minute runtime of Mallrats, everyone is baby-faced and beautiful. 
  
  And while everyone is very charming, I do have to give a special mention to Jason Lee, who is so fucking perfect in this movie. A show-stealer and the absolute prototype for the quick-witted loudmouth slacker. It has been said before, but it is amazing how Ryan Reynolds stole Lee’s entire schtick, got abs, and made a billion dollars off it.

Absolute peak Jason Lee. Deadpool should pay him royalties.

• Every character’s name is so distinctly 90s. Rene. Brodie. Brandi with an i. Willam with no i. T.S. Gwen. Trish the Dish. These names only existed in the 90s. As far as I know, a Gwen has not been born in America post-9/11. You cannot prove otherwise.

• Anytime I watch a movie that relies heavily on sophomoric 90s humor, I brace myself for a certain amount of dated cultural off-notes. Not that I want to get into the dreaded They Could Never Make This Movie Today conversation, because I do think context is important, but I was surprised by how well it aged in that regard. The most egregious offenses were a few uses of “retard,” a word which was recently on the verge of eeking out a cultural comeback thanks to its adoption by post-irony comedy podcasters but has more recently been squashed thanks to its adoption by alt-right chuds.

• You see Michael Rooker’s bare ass in this movie. Did not remember that. Probably purposefully. I don’t know if he’d show cheek in a movie today now that he has that Marvel money coming in, but he fully committed to this role and I am still sort of terrified of him as a result.

• As I mentioned, every movie I’ve ever loved rests only a few feet deep in the pit of my memory. But I was surprised by how far down my recollections of everything in this movie were buried. Especially during the first act, I found myself thinking, “I don’t remember this at all.” Stan Lee’s cameo—completely forgot about that. Chocolate covered pretzels—nope. The EXTREMELY long comic book homage over the opening credits—File Not Found in my brain. Even something as deliberately memorable as the tri-nippled fortune teller didn’t come back to me right away. Yet every once in a while, I found myself instinctively mouthing along with something I didn’t fully remember. My mouth would whisper “Do it, Doug” or “Ye have little faith, want a cookie?” under my own breath and I’d think, “Who said that?” only to realize it was me. Or maybe it was the teenage me, still alive in there somewhere. 

So, why was Mallrats so deeply excavated from my brain over the years? Could it be that I simply never go to the mall anymore, and the movie’s relevance has therefore faded from my daily life? This is a question for another time. For now, I will just say that I had a great time with Mallrats in this, the year 2024. There is a lot to like about it, even now. I think it has held up better than a lot of its peers, like Empire Records, which I rewatched this morning and felt no nostalgic love for, whatsoever. Every character was paper-thin. Movies like Empire Records taught 90s kids that you could have one of four personality types—depressed, horny, wiseass, or dumb. (I chose wiseass.) It’s also painfully unquotable.

Did not remember this character or her very weird storyline.

Of course, it's impossible to say with any degree of certainty what I would think of Mallrats if I was watching it for the first time today. I can’t imagine I’d think it was a “good” movie by any stretch. But I hope I would at least appreciate it for capturing the work of a young filmmaker who wanted to come off like a typical 90s slacker but actually had a lot of ambition and novel ideas.

I think Smith tips his hat to his own duality as a creatively repressed suburban deadbeat in the last scene of the movie. The network suit, unimpressed by the lame game show format but enamored with Jason Lee’s appearance on it, asks him, “Have you ever considered hosting your own talk show?” To which Lee instinctively and obviously replies, “Yeah.” Smash cut to him hosting The Tonight Show. This is how Kevin Smith carved out a career, by speaking for the people men in their moms’ basements who so deeply believed they could do a better job making movies and TV shows than the tripe that was being fed to mainstream America, the snobs who felt their nerdy pop culture references were not being represented. They wanted to see characters arguing about Superman’s jizz on the big screen, dammit! Most of them were completely misguided in their arrogance and thankfully remained on the futons where they belonged, but Kevin Smith was the one guy smart enough to make Superman jizz conversations a reality.

Feeling like I’d turned too blind an eye to the works of Kevin Smith over the years, I followed up this viewing of Mallrats with his most recent film, The 4:30 Movie, which I thoroughly hated. Lesson learned. But I still stand by Mallrats. Maybe I will rewatch this movie one day when I am 50 or 60 and it won’t be enjoyable anymore. Maybe when I’m 70 it will lose its charm and the words “snootchie boochies” will have no effect on me. But for right now, I say, snoogans.

I should mention that some names here have been changed to protect the innocent—those who may suffer personal or professional harm by being outed as Kevin Smith movie-enjoyers.

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