Time flies when you’re having fun, and writer/director Kevin Smith’s latest film The 4:30 Movie (2024) shows he’s had a hell of a lot of it over his prolific career.

It’s been thirty years since the release of Clerks (1994), the audaciously subversive microbudget comedy that put Smith on the map. Since then, Smith has had a lot of ups and downs in his career. Religious controversy (Dogma (1999)), establishing his own multiverse (Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)), and aquatic body horror (Tusk (2014)) are among the highlights, but no life event affected Smith more than the massive heart attack in 2018 that nearly ended his life.

In the wake of such a perspective-altering event, Smith re-invented himself. He went on a press tour, went vegan, but most importantly, began to self-fund a litany of projects, including legacy sequels Jay & Silent Bob Reboot (2019) and Clerks III (2022). While by no means masterpieces, both films serve as victory laps for Smith and allow fans to bask in the relationships they’ve built with the characters they’ve loved for decades.

Enter The 4:30 Movie, which connects the gap to those who’ve longed for Smith to explore an original concept again while also paying homage to the nostalgic feelings that come with Smith’s late-stage career.

The film follows a day in the life of three film-loving teenagers: Brian (Austin Zajur), Belly (Reed Northrup), and Burny (Nicholas Cirillo). Burny waxes his prized truck and woos local girls, Belly wrings his hands and gets himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Brian dreams of two things: becoming a filmmaker and going steady with the girl of his dreams, Melody Barnegat (Siena Agudong). After sharing a kiss together the summer prior, Brian finally gets the nerve to ask Melody out, which she accepts, and the pair agree to meet at their local cinema later that afternoon.

For the next hour or so, The 4:30 Movie goes through a lot of the same motions as Smith’s recent outputs, just under the guise of new characters. It’s safe to assume that most people going to see this will already be established fans of Smith, and that’s who much of the film plays towards. Unlike Jay & Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III, however, The 4:30 Movie is more accessible to the average moviegoer simply looking for a cute coming-of-age story with Gen X sensibilities.

For Smith diehards, the in-jokes and cameos are plentiful. Two of the highlights include Justin Long as a Stryper jacket-toting Christian metalhead named Stank and Jason Biggs, who meets an unfortunate fate in one of three mid-movie trailers that’s too good to spoil.

Not all of the cameos effectively land, though; rapper Logic and Office Space’s Diedrich Bader in the Flash Gordon-inspired Astro Blaster & the Beavermen overstay their welcome, their only purpose being to pad the film out to a feature-length runtime. However, unlike Jay & Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III, the cameos aren’t at the forefront of our investment and the focus is where it should be: on its three leads.

Credit to Destro Films

Where The 4:30 Movie excels compared to Smith’s other late-stage career offerings is its sentimentality and laid-back tone thanks to the charismatic camaraderie of Brian, Belly, and Burny.

Zajur has an amiable screen presence in his pursuit of Melody, whom he shares terrific chemistry with in the film’s opening scene. Northrup plays the nervous archetype admirably, and Cirillo represents the embodiment of the friend many people knew at one point in their life: Someone we admire for their collected charisma but masks the emotional insecurities they’re afraid of revealing.

The 4:30 Movie’s problems are minute compared to some of Smith’s sloppier, more recent offerings, but the third act rift that reveals Burny’s insecurities could have used another edit. When the film is relaxed and less driven by plot, for Smith to throw this explosive dynamic into the mix acts as a disservice to the spirited, earnest vibe the film was building up until this point.

Not to mention the film still can’t shake the fact that it looks amateurish, which comes with the territory of independent filmmaking and was prevalent throughout Jay & Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III. The stills included in this review may look nice on the surface, but any scene shot in daylight has this uneasy, vaseline-smear quality, making everything look distractingly overexposed.

At its best, Smith taps into the same earnest sentimentality that fellow Gen X indie darling Richard Linklater unearthed in Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), where a Texas college baseball team shoots the shit over the course of a long weekend in 1980. At its worst, Smith second-guesses himself, committing to clichés that he’s above at this point in his career.

Regardless of its flaws, The 4:30 Movie possesses a heart and a finger on the pulse of ‘80s filmgoing nostalgia, which Smith’s core fanbase will undoubtedly eat up by the spoonful.

Review Courtesy of Landon Defever

Feature Image Courtesy of Saban Films via IMDB