The 4:30 Movie (2024) review

Dir. Kevin Smith

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

Life would be a much safer, happier place if it were anything like Kevin Smith’s romantic, rose-colored glasses view of the world. All conflicts would be solvable with a heart-to-heart. The good guys would win. A pair of minimum wage earners would be gifted money to become entrepreneurs by to a pair of drug dealers. The most contentious arguments would revolve around Star Wars discourse. There would be more familiar faces in every day encounters than your average Cheers rerun.

With all that in mind, purchasing a theater he used to frequent as a child, rehabbing it, making it a part of his quintessential nerd brand, and then commissioning a nostalgic ode to a gaggle of 80s teenagers spending lazy summer afternoons sneaking into movies is the most Kevin Smith thing I can possibly imagine. The man who has now made four movies centered around making movies now pivots to reminding you how much they’ve meant to him since his salad days.

That’s the rub of The 4:30 Movie, a semi-autobiographical work in which Kevin Smith sees himself as Brian David (Austin Zajur, Clerks III), a high school junior and unabashed movie nerd. The film begins with Brian asking his sophomore crush, Melody (Siena Agudong), out to see an R-rated detective comedy called “Bucklick” (a not-so subtle parody of Fletch). Melody doesn’t get off work till late afternoon, so she agrees to meet Brian at “the 4:30 movie.”

To kill the day, Brian rounds up his friends — the cocksure ladies man Burny (Nicholas Cirillo) and the dorky Belly (Reed Northup) — to see three movies: “Bucklick,” “Dental School,” and “Astro Blaster and the Beavermen,” which Brian has already seen 14 times. Predictably, antics ensue. If Burny isn’t trying to screw everything that moves, the theater’s hot-headed manager, Mike (Ken Jeong), keeps turning up and throwing them out for one violation after another.

View Askew devotees such as myself will undoubtedly entertain themselves doing the “Leonardo DiCaprio point” at all the Kevin Smith alums who pop up in the film. Jeff Anderson (Randal Graves) has a cameo as a father in line at the theater. Jason Lee is Brian’s dad. Smith’s daughter, Harley Quinn, stars as a nun-turned-hooker-turned-murderer in a fake trailer that looks more fun than the movie dad elected to make. Justin Long is a ne’er-do-well theatergoer whose presence gets less funny the longer he stays on screen because Smith can’t let a good thing die easy. Method Man, Rosario Dawson, and Jason Biggs also appear, and rapper Logic (whose music video for his song “Highlife” was set in the Quick Stop from Clerks) is none other than Astro Blaster himself. Brian O’Halloran’s cameo as a priest, evident in the film’s trailer, appears to have been left on the cutting room floor.

It’s difficult to be too unkind to The 4:30 Movie because it’s a film that revels in simplicity. It’s a feel-good charmer that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and is staged like a series of vignettes. However, that approach contributes to its shortcomings. For one, there isn’t much in the way of conflict nor true dramatic heft. The trio of Brian, Burny, and Belly don’t come close to stumbling into great revelations ala Dante, Randal, or even Jay and Silent Bob. They’re low-brow dudes who love wrestling and movies, which is fine, but don’t be surprised when you find yourself cringing more than laughing.

Even when the three are trying to antagonize Mike, it’s abundantly clear he’s little besides a cartoon villain. There’s also some seriously strange things going on with the film’s pacing. At one point, Brian’s afternoon of movies is interrupted when Mike informs him that his mother has called the theater and wants to speak with him. This results in a five-minute diversion of mom yelling at Brian that he needs to wash her cat, a lecture about saying “I love you,” and other trivialities that take us away from the camaraderie between the boys that is just starting to build.

Consider that so much of the humor in The 4:30 Movie is built around hilariously ludicrous quips that are written as such because they draw upon our contemporary knowledge. At one point, Burny claims a movie adaptation of Batman would “flop” because nobody would ever pay to see the Dark Knight on the big screen. A pro-wrestler claims that “Bill Cosby will always be respectable.” Burny is at it again later when he claims that “post-credit sequences will never take off.” If Nicholas Cirillo (who is the funniest of the core trio, I’ll add) was a mainstay in Marvel movies, there might have been some winking fourth-wall irony to his statement. Apparently, Smith removed the weed from his diet and his humor went from “weed, dick, and fart jokes” to dad jokes and old takes exposed.

The best of The 4:30 Movie comes late — as late as can be for a movie that’s barely 80 minutes long — and it involves the romance between Brian and Melody. By this point, Melody is name-dropped so frequently that it’s almost a relief to see her finally get some agency of her own. Siena Agudong (who I remember as the little girl in Alex & Me, alongside USWNT star Alex Morgan) flaunts a convincing Jersey accent, and it’s in these scenes where Zajur comes across as a believable teenage stand-in for Kevin Smith. After all that lollygagging coupled with listless gags, it’s here where Smith arrives at a moment not unlike the conclusion of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. If you view The 4:30 Movie thru that prism, you might find what Smith is doing here likable, in spite of its tendencies that sicken about as much as a movie theater-sized box of Dots.

That being said, if you’re intrigued by the idea of a movie revolving around a teenage cinephile, who thinks getting a job at a video-store be one of the best things ever to happen to him instead of a life lesson he so desperately needs, here’s my unsolicited recommendation to see Chandler Levack’s I Like Movies as soon as possible.

Starring: Austin Zajur, Nicholas Cirillo, Reed Northrup, Siena Agudong, Ken Jeong, Justin Long, Rachel Dratch, Jason Lee, Sam Richardson, Adam Pally, Harley Quinn Smith, Method Mann, Logic, Rosario Dawson, Jason Mewes, Jason Biggs, and Jeff Anderson. Directed by: Kevin Smith.