MOVIE DETAILS
Rating: 4.3 out of 10
Release date: 2 September 2016 (USA)
Director: Kevin Smith
Film series: True North trilogy
Box office: 38,784 USD
Budget: 50 lakhs USD
Distributed by: Invincible Pictures
TRAILER
OVERVIEW – Yoga Hosers
Colleen and Colleen (Lily-Rose Depp and Harley Quinn Smith) have been best friends ever since they were little kids. Nowadays, they spend most of their days going to yoga, talking about boys, and most importantly, working their dead-end jobs at a local convenience store that they so desperately hate, yet, have to do because the one Colleen’s dad (Tony Hale) owns it and always needs the store in tip-top shape, even if neither of them are hardly ever around to make sure that it’s actually getting the business it needs to thrive.
However, their job has gotten a lot harder, when it turns out that people have been mysteriously and randomly being murdered all across the area of Montreal. Why? Or better yet, who? Well, neither of them really know, but you know who does? Legendary detective and crime-solver Guy LaPointe (Johnny Depp) does and he decides to join forces with the two gals, to not just figure out what is killing all of these people, but also to make himself feel better.
Meanwhile, the two Colleens also are trying to start a band and keep on getting sidetracked by all of this murder business that they want no part of.
Kevin Smith, what the hell bro? Someone who started out as one of my favorite writers and directors, someone who I literally asked a question in real life, someone who’s movies, no matter how awful they could get, I stuck up, what has happened here? After Tusk and now Yoga Hosers, it seems as if Smith has lost himself a whole lot; while he’s making admirable attempts to get away from his slacker past and try towards something more ambitious and fun, does it really have to be this?
Seriously?
Because after watching Yoga Hosers, I am pretty damn sure that the Kevin Smith that I once knew, laughed at and loved, is all but dead and gone. Sure, Red State was meh and Tusk was bad, but now, I don’t even know what to make sense of. It’s almost as if Smith himself wasn’t quite sure of what he was making, but knew that he wanted to make something weird, had a whole lot of money in his pockets, had a cast who was willing to work, and didn’t care of anything else that matters, so put together this slap-dash movie that plays out like a bad joke.
You know, the kind where someone has to be “in” on it?
But it doesn’t seem like anyone is, except for Smith himself.
To be honest though, there are small, if incredibly brief moments of pure hilarity from Smith and his screenplay; no matter how twisted or warped he gets into his own head and believing in his own crap, he still can’t help himself but to be funny. Some small snippets of dialogue connect and for some odd reason, it transports you to a time where Smith not just gave a crap, but did actually want to appeal to others outside of his weird head. Nowadays, though, it’s weird – Smith doesn’t seem to care, or if he does, he doesn’t actually show it to anyone.
Because once all of the funny bits and pieces of dialogue are dead and gone with, he then tries whatever he can to make a plot, which consists of, bear with me, faux rock-bands, a French detective who wasn’t at all funny in the so-called “predecessor”, yoga, drinking, partying, sex, friendship, hockey, Canadians, Americans, maple syrup, accents, hot dogs, Nazis, Al Pacino impersonations, and uh yeah, whatever the hell Yoga Hosers actually are.
So yeah, you get the idea.
Yoga Hosers, as a movie, is a complete mess, but it’s not even an interesting one, to say the very least. So much stuff happens, yet, none of it ever registers as having any sort of reasoning; it seems as if Smith is just throwing everything at the wall, because he wanted to, had the opportunity to, or just didn’t simply give a hoot. Sometimes, that can be fine, when you have an auteur known for making the inexplicably weird and unintelligible, interesting (David Lynch, The Coen’s), but no offense, Smith is nowhere near that caliber.
But it’s not like that’s even a bad thing, either. In fact, one of the things that drew me to Smith, the person, as well as the artist, was the fact that he was this normal, everyday dude who loved movies, who loved TV, who loved pop-culture, and who especially loved comic books, and also had this talent to make these small, low-budget movies that were nasty and dirty, but also incredibly funny and, at times, heartwarming. He was this small director who didn’t set-out to really change the world in which we live in, but instead, offer-up some brief, fleeting moments of entertainment and fun for us all to laugh and enjoy.
Nowadays though, that Smith is gone.
It’s not a bad thing that he’s decided to change things up with his career, and get weirder, and far more serious, but it’s a bad thing when it just doesn’t work and make it seem like he’s abandoning everything he’s once known, loved and stood by. Nowadays, rather than making a good, funny and heartfelt movie about real, everyday, normal people, he’s making movies that seem to revolve solely around his friends and family. Once again, nothing entirely wrong with that, however, it has to all come together and work – something that Yoga Hosers never does.
It’s not funny, it’s not insightful, it’s not exciting, it’s not compelling, it’s not dramatic, and it sure as hell isn’t even well-acted. If anything, Yoga Hosers is just another sure sign that people should stop giving money to Smith, so that he’ll realize that, okay, yeah, maybe he does need to chill out and get back down to ground level, where all of us fellow human beings are sitting firmly at. And then, maybe then, I’ll accept him back into my good graces and forgive him, once and for all.
But until then, I’m done. Sorry, Kev. We had a good run together, but sometimes, all good runs must come to an end.
Consensus: Weird, unfunny, dumb and just downright hard-to-watch, Yoga Hosers is the clearest example of Kevin Smith’s tragic fall from grace and artistry, further proving how his best days are long, long behind him.
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