The 4:30 Movie 4K 2024 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

1980-е. Three teenagers go to the local movie theater and go from room to room to different pictures.

Review 4K Movie

In the hot summer of 1986, shy 16-year-old Brian David (Austin Zajour) musters up the courage to invite the love of his high school life, Melody Barniguet (Sienna Agudong), to the movies. The couple fixes a time, place, and movie: it's decided to slip into a 4:30 p.m. screening of “Buckleek,” an R-rated adaptation of a fictional detective novel at a local theater. Brian and his friends have a well-established scheme: buy tickets to teen movies, then, distracting security, hop from auditorium to auditorium on adult movies. While waiting for Melody, Brian hangs out with his best friends: the quintessential '80s machismo guy Bernie (Nicholas Cirillo) and the modest Belly (Reed Northrup). The three goofballs talk about movies, girls (mostly soloing Burnie) and plans for the future and, as usual, do not suspect that the coming day will be a turning point in the life of each of them.

The exact same day for Kevin Smith was February 25, 2018, when the director had a heart attack after one of his performances. Fortunately, the tragedy was avoided, but the incident seriously affected Smith's work - from comedy thrash he sharply hit the self-reflection. So appeared “Clerks 3”, where the main character also experiences a heart attack and decides to make a movie about it. In “The 4:30 Movie”, the director goes back to his adolescence, remembering how he was a carefree teenager, just like Brian David, hiding from theater security to sneak into screenings of “Aliens” or “Highlander”.

“The 4:30 Movie” feels like a pleasant dream from the past - the soft color palette, the unhurried but scrappy narrative, the awkward flirtation with 80s visual aesthetics. The movie has a beautiful opening scene, where Smith masterfully designates the era with mere details. And then the dialogue and Smith's trademark humor begin, and the magic is over. Once upon a time, back in 1994, after the release of “Clerks” Kevin Smith was prophesied a great future, putting in line with Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee. The director had the power of youth, an irrepressible desire to tell his stories and an impressive pop-cultural background. But time has taken its toll: from promising auteur and geek icon, Smith turned first into a very distinctive comedy writer, and then into the kind of boomer who, in response to a tirade about whyZack Snyder's “Justice League” is a great movie, gets an understated “Okay.”.

In “The 4:30 Movie,” Smith struggles to return to his roots, a forgotten sense of the process of artisanal filmmaking with friends - it's no coincidence that most of the film's scenes were shot at Smodcastle Cinemas, which the director co-owns. In place and favorite cameos: Jason Lee, Justin Long, Rosario Dawson, Jason Mewes and the rest of Smith's buddies appear in the frame who for a few seconds, and who for a frightening monologue about “Rocky 4”. The whole crew probably had a lot of fun on set, but for the audience, the glimpses of vaguely familiar faces and references to the director's previous films make no sense.

The attempt to enter the territory of the king of teen comedy of the 80s John Hughes was also unsuccessful. The trio of main characters is in no way comparable to the characters in “The Breakfast Club” or “Sixteen Candles” - Brian, Byrne and Belly have tediously flat characters. That's not to say that the young men aren't interesting to watch, they each get some semblance of development, the arcs close thinly, and by the finale the characters' paths converge into a single luscious happy ending. In addition, Smith managed to very accurately convey the feeling of permanent teenage awkwardness. This dissonance makes it seem as if the director knows exactly what he wants to show, but sometimes he just forgets to turn the camera on.

The comedic component of “The 4:30 Movie” is cracking at the seams. If you exclude the relatively bearable slapstick, Smith's puns are reduced to the banal formula “Ha, I hope Lucas never makes ‘Star Wars’ again, it would be a complete failure. But the little snippets of fictional movies the characters watch in the theater look so bad that they involuntarily stick diamonds in the memory. Perhaps someday we really will see a blockbuster Astroblaster and Beaver Man, especially since Kevin Smith has a rich cinematic history with such chimeras.

“The 4:30 Movie” once again confirms that Kevin Smith as a director and screenwriter is out of circulation, long ago stuck in his own comfortable universe where people move between the roadside store and the movie theater, debate who's cooler - Batman or Green Lantern - and refuse to grow old (at least in spirit). In the final act of “Séance,” a nameless girl working at the multiplex box office delivers a monologue that sums up Smith's filmography just fine: “The truth is, kid, you and I were born to make movies. We just haven't done it yet.”