[1.8/10] I refuse to believe that the same man who wrote [*Clerks*](https://trakt.tv/comments/794234), and [*Dogma*](https://trakt.tv/movies/dogma-1999), and [*Chasing Amy*](https://trakt.tv/comments/806311) wrote *Jay & Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie!*. The works of Kevin Smith have always been raunchy, but the blue humor was clever, and generally came with heart. That's what elevated even the rough-edges of a DIY film about life in a convenience store into something relatable that spoke to the human condition. The *Super Groovy Cartoon Movie* is a comedy desert, full of nothing but the most bottom of the barrel dick and fart jokes machine gunned at the audience for sixty-three of the most pointless minutes of your life. There are no actual characters or anything reflecting a real human being in this story, just thin vehicles for the aforementioned dick and fart jokes who exist purely to touch their penises or mention weed and hope that somehow suffices for comedy. The film is, in theory, one long superhero spoof, with Jay and Silent Bob stepping into their roles as Bluntman and Chronic to...I don’t know...fight sophomoric crime or something? The plot is as aimless as the dong-based supervillain. The titular stoners just sort of drift from obliviously evading countless classic superhero origin stories, to lucking into wealth and a makeshift batcave, to a stand-off with a pack of bad guys who announce their pointless backstories before making the scene to literally shoot cum and punch people in the dick. At times, for all its slacker-as-philosopher bent, *Clerks* came off like something a college freshman might come up with. Well, the humor, storytelling, and set pieces of *Super Groovy Cartoon Movie* come off like something from a middle schooler who sits at the back of the classroom. It makes *Beavis & Butthead* look like NPR. Hell, it makes the otherwise execrable [*Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back*](https://trakt.tv/comments/826559) seem downright tolerable by comparison. What kills me is that, if anyone should be able to pull off an irreverent superhero spoof, it’s Smith and company. *Super Groovy Cartoon Movie* came out in the heyday of Smith’s *Fatman on Batman* podcast, where he practically worshiped at the altar of classic interpretations of the Dark Knight like *Batman: The Animated Series*. You can see the marks of that with roles for the likes of star D.C. Animated Universe alumni like Kevin Conroy and Tara Strong. Unfortunately, their talents are utterly wasted on his spandex-adjacent crudfest. Despite decades of comic book fandom, the best Smith can come up with in terms of parodying the genre is to have someone jam Loki’s scepter up his rear end. That's really where the movie’s humor begins and ends. “Butts, and shoving things up them, is inherently funny, or at least it better be, because it’s all we have.” The film can boast a few legitimate homages to comic classics, like baddies falling in vats of acid or Jay remarking that villains are a superstitious and cowardly lot. But for the most part, despite Smith’s intimate knowledge of the genre, the cape elements of the movie are a minor foundation for scatalogical comedy, rather than the other way around. Somebody who’d seen a single comic book movie could have come up with this crap, so long as they’d spent the rest of their lives alternating their gaze between the toilet and their own junk. Somehow, that's not the long and the short of the film’s problems. Visually, the film is a chore to look at. Some leeway ought to be given to an independent film production producing original animation. But my god, the designs look like something you’d find on Deviant Art circa 2003, with animation roughly at the level of a flash cartoon on eBaum’s World (which about represents the level of comedy as well). The whole thing looks amateurish, with a weird mix of stiff movements and overexaggerated expressions that fail to meet the standards of a professional production. If you’ve watched Adult Swim’s output over the years, you're probably the target audience for this movie, and have developed a tolerance for makeshift animation. But *Super Groovy Cartoon Movie* is an odd mix of faux-polish and DIY rough edges that makes the film’s visuals seem cheap and unsightly, a far cry from the distinctive style of *Clerks: The Animated Series*. Unfortunately, this film *does* carry over some of the less desirable qualities of its animated Askewniverse predecessor. *Super Groovy Cartoon Movie* comes with a strain of casual sexism, racism, and homophobia that could (arguably) be tolerated as a product of their times for a cartoon released in the year 2000. But a film released nearly a decade and a half later can't make the same excuses, and Smith’s fourth wall-breaking aside that he identifies with lesbians because he enjoys the same sexual organs they do does little to quell the problem. The voice acting is also remarkably substandard. Pros like Strong deliver the goods. But Jason Mewes, who did perfectly fine voicing Jay in *Clerks: The Animated Series*, sounds out of place when having to carry the film with his motormouthed voice work. And Jennifer Schwalbach, who was fine at worst in her live action roles in *Strike Back* and [*Clerks II*](https://trakt.tv/comments/841388), is utterly atrocious from the recording booth in her brief role as Blunt Girl. The awkward pacing and janky character poses do no one any favors, but the film sounds more like buddies tooling around mid-podcast than a legitimate release. That's the best excuse I can give for the cinematic dumpster fire that is *Jay & Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie!*. If you want to write it off as a bunch of foul-mouthed improv from Kevin Smith and his circle of podcast friends and acquaintances, then it could at least pass muster as a sort of animated end-of-year talent show for people who never mentally left high school. It lacks professional polish in how it looks, how it sounds, how it tries to tell a story, and especially in how it tries to make you laugh. But taken as more of a product of buddies making random crap together, if you squint, you can kind of see the charm in it, or at least the good intentions. But that doesn't make it any less of a mind-numbing chore to sit through for an hour. That doesn't make the end product any less of a smoking crater where a movie should be. And it doesn’t make *Jay & Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Movie!* any less of a severe disappointment from a creator who originally made his name by turning chicken shit into chicken salad, and is now content to churn out a movie where the only source of humor or personality is character after character talking about their own drumstick.