ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO written and directed by Kevin Smith, with Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks. An Alliance Films release. 101 minutes. Opens Friday (October 31). For venues and times, see Movies.
Zack And Miri Make A Porno might be a pleasure for fan boys who still have a hard-on for director Kevin Smith.
For the rest of us, it’s a movie that blows so hard it makes actual porno look like Fellini. Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks play the titular Zack and Miri. They’re lifelong platonic pals who desperately make amateur porn to pay their bills but accidentally fall in love between takes.
The characters are flat cut-outs from Smith’s cache of bantering schlubs. Banks rises above the director’s material, which tediously stretches out what spare potty humour he has left. The movie gets even more frustrating when it takes the shape of a conventional rom-com. That’s when the characters nonsensically hold out on crucial plot information, from each other and the audience, with no other purpose than to punish everybody by giving us a severe case of blue balls.RS
