Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

Most movie wiseacres perform. Jason Mewes exists, and that's his unruly glory. When he first showed up in ''Clerks,'' his lips pursed, his long blond hair shaved at the sides, he looked like nothing so much as the meanest New Jersey girl you'd ever laid eyes on. He was the dilapidated, vaguely threatening skate punk who spent junior high standing between the side-hall doors, then did the same thing in high school, then graduated to the parking lot. Mewes, however, was the least slack slacker who ever lived. From the outset, he talked a ticker-tape of obscenity, his dialogue a lusty rap of pure adolescent hormones.

In the celebrated cult role of Jay, Mewes is one half of the cheerfully blasphemous revue team known as Jay and Silent Bob, who have had a role in every Kevin Smith film, from the no-budget ''Clerks'' to the comparatively deluxe Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. But the teamwork has always been fairly perfunctory. Silent Bob, as embodied by the portly, bearded, coolly anti-cool Smith himself, is basically a mute guy who just stands there, making the occasional hipster hand gesture. Jay, by contrast, is a human cherry bomb, the most detonatingly funny in a long line of idiot-savant anti-achievers (Wayne and Garth, Bill and Ted, Beavis and Butt-head, etc.).

Imagine Dana Carvey's Garth stoked with the street nihilism of Eminem and the raunch of Al Goldstein, and you'll have a fair description of Mewes, the cinema's original suburban hip-hop id. He's a performer at once so larkish and so mysterious that the pivotal joke of his presence -- funny because it just might be true -- is that in a world of spotlight- sucking wannabes, he's a deadbeat pretending to be an actor so that he can hoodwink the audience by parading his irrepressible self.

Can Mewes carry a movie? (God knows, Silent Bob can't.) ''Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back'' is a testament to the ticklish authority of his stoner solipsism, his baby-talk thug stance. The picture itself is a hit-or-miss affair that starts out wobbly and then gathers comic momentum. Some of the jokes are tired (Carrie Fisher as an uptight nun, a quartet of ''Charlie's Angels''-flavored jewel thieves), and the whole notion that Jay and Silent Bob would be upset, rather than delighted, that Hollywood had decided to make a movie out of their comic-book alter egos, Bluntman and Chronic, suggests that Smith has been spending too much time fretting over what people say about him on the Web. The two hitchhike to L.A. to stop the production, and at certain moments their road odyssey becomes as blandly wacky as anything in ''Rat Race.'' But then they arrive at the Miramax backlot, and the belly laughs erupt.

Smith, coming off the madly audacious ''Dogma,'' knows that he's slumming this time and revels in it. With his wily catechismic mind, he has planted nearly every criticism that you could have of ''Jay and Silent Bob'' directly into the movie, and he crams the screen like a pinata with in-jokes, blockbuster parodies, drooler references, and star cameos (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck do a crackerjack self-satire). The Bluntman and Chronic movie turns out to be a Kevin Smith wet dream: ''Star Wars'' gone stoned. It's a long way from that Quick Stop, and Jason Mewes, for one, looks as if he dug the trip.

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