the most imaginative part of mallrats comes with its opening credits , which are blatantly sexual comic book pictures--and that's not too imaginative either . the biggest laugh in mallrats , from an audience of 11-12-year-olds assembled in rows 15 and 16 , came when the two protagonists-buddies consult a fortune teller who bares her top and exhibits three nipples . ( number three , of course , is a fake , but the boys are taken in ) . even then , it was only size 4 or 5 laughter on a scale of 1 to 10 . the view of american youth in mallrats tries to be funny , which it isn't . it might have been a satire of slackers and mall culture but it isn't that either . it's plain dull and just a series of nails in the american coffin . the filmmaker is kevin smith , whose feature writer-director debut was clerks , an original , plotless comedy of people in and around a convenience and a video store . the absurdist , slice-of-life , desultorily conversational and pointedly scatological clerks was a hit , though i had my reservations about it . mallrats , done in the same spirit and with some of the same actors ( smith himself playing silent bob ) , is a flop . it has something of a plot , vague and disjointed . t . s . ( notice the scatology of the name ) ( jeremy london ) has been dumped by his fiancee brandi ( claire forlani ) for reasons too dull to mention . brodie ( jason lee ) , has been dumped by his girl rene ( shannen doherty ) because , in bed , he is more interested in video-games than in sex . ( let's not even talk about love ) . the two men ( men ? ) find solace in doing what any red-blooded idiots will do . they go to the mall . there , a subplot has them trying to sabotage that day's forthcoming game show , a kind of dating game , which is produced by brandi's father , a youthful but bald creep . the movie's comedy is below sitcom level , the dialogue , action and characters are of no interest , except perhaps to people under twenty with a mental age under six . since those people neither read film reviews nor put any credence in adult judgments , mallrats might just have a career , even though it is exceptionally thin and dull in every way . the best that can be said is that , at the mall , smith places a fat young man who stares at a sort of pointillist painting which , looked at with concentration , reveals a sailboat . but the poor fellow stands there and stands there and can't see a thing . not a bad gag , though thoroughly milked . another " funny " item is about a fifteen-year old girl who is presumably so bright that she's a senior . she is writing a book about orgasms and researches by sleeping with men right and left and videotaping the activities . her language is raunchy even by kevin smith standards , standards that use the alphabet from the a-word to perhaps some z-word , though the n-word is not heard . the fun and games are uncoordinated and slipshod . the film might have used updated marx brothers strategies instead of applying a para-clerks style which relies on frail crutches instead of tempo , energy or the occasional witticism . there are also other inconsistencies . in her letter of resignation , so to speak , brodie's girl lists his defects . brodie thinks that " callow " is the only nice thing in the letter , yet he will occasionally use a hi-fallutin' word . we also think for a long time that brodie and co . are high-schoolers , but are told at the end that they are college students . somehow , comic-book author and icon stan lee shows up , gives sage advice to brodie . it might have been amusing , it is merely artificial . and here and there are tentative take-offs , but these do not take off . 
