THE 4:30 MOVIE - Mark Reviews Movies

The 4:30 Movie, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 12, 2024

It's technically the summer of 1986 in The 4:30 Movie, but everything about this strained comedy seems to exist in writer/director Kevin Smith's mind. The hero is a teenage boy who spends his life watching movies and television shows or talking about them to anyone who will listen. Obviously, he's a stand-in for Smith, who rose to some fame in the 1990s with a crop of other independent filmmakers whose film knowledge oozed through the pores of their movies and, in Smith's case particularly, the way their characters talked.

Smith has had—let's call it—an interesting run since the zenith of his career, after achieving a fine amount of goodwill for his personal films but before trying—and failing—to go mainstream. He has gone back to his independent roots in more recent years, and Smith also keeps returning to the material that made him famous whenever things become particularly rough.

There's a good reason to allude to his first film and its subsequent, belated sequels here. That's not only because, like Smith's newest movie, those ones about hapless store clerks, who spend their days talking about pop culture, started and became increasingly autobiographical. It's also for a more direct reason, but we'll just leave it at that.

This one feels even more superficially personal than the others, because Brian (Austin Zajur) looks and sounds like the teen one imagines Smith would have looked and sounded like around that age. At the time of the story's setting, the filmmaker would have been a teenager, too, likely spending entire days at a time at his local movie theater, after making specific plans with pals on which movies to see and on how to sneak into any movie that the theater deemed them too young to be watching.

Anyone who grew up loving movies can relate to such an idea, but that's about where the relatability of this movie ends. It's less about the movies, as well as the main character's love for them, and more about assembling a string of overly eccentric characters, a series of convoluted complications, and a handful of on-screen parodies that are dreadfully unconvincing. For a movie that's ostensibly about a kid's passion for film, this doesn't seem particularly affectionate of or, for that matter, interested in movies.

The foundational problem, perhaps, is in Smith's premise. The entire plot does indeed revolve around Brian and his two closest friends, meek but observant Belly (Reed Northrup) and truck-obsessed Burny (Nicholas Cirillo), spending an entire day at their local theater, where they plan to watch three movies in a row.

The notion of watching three teens watch three movies isn't especially dramatic or interesting, unless the trio also plans on doing something during or talking throughout those movies. Some things happen in one auditorium, before their plans are smashed by a bunch of avoidable incidents and mishaps, so that just leaves these three characters to argue, bond, and occasionally tell Brian how cool it is that he loves movies so much and could make one someday in the future.

Most of that latter talk comes from Melody (Siena Agudong), the girl Brian has liked for more than a year and almost started dating last summer. Even though he spent almost an entire year not communicating with her, she agrees to go meet him at the theater for a 4:30 show. After all, she really, really thinks it's just so cool that the guy knows so much about movies and television. We know this because she says it at least three times over the course of the day—twice during the introductory phone conversation.

It's around this early point in the movie that Smith's self-indulgence overshadows any sense of nostalgia, sincerity, and seeing these characters, not to mention any of the side players and multiple cameos, as anything approaching real people. Brian loves movies and like-likes Melody, while speaking such deep thoughts on those subjects into a tape recorder.

Belly is kicked out of the theater by the manager (played by Ken Jeong) after being falsely accused of public indecency, only to be eighty-sixed again for actually being indecent in a public space. Burny is so abjectly cruel toward Brian and about Melody that a confrontation is inevitable. Belly giving a lengthy monologue about how the two friends feel about each other is doubly lazy—as a piece of writing unto itself and because the characters are so thin that this has to be explained.

It's almost not worth talking about the fake movies in The 4:30 Movie, since they're all vapid spoofs. They do, though, reflect the half-hearted effort of the entirety of the movie.

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