To call Zack & Miri Make a Porno Kevin Smith’s best movie in years is faint praise indeed. Beating Jersey Girl and Clerks II in the watchability stakes is not much of a feat. But the good news is that Zack & Miri is leaps and bounds better than those films, and actually comes pretty close to being Smith’s second or third best movie. In fact, if Zack & Miri had come out after Dogma, we’d probably be still talking about Kevin Smith as a serious filmmaker. We certainly wouldn’t be looking at that Criterion version of Chasing Amy with as much bemusement, anyway.

Smith has always been very vocal about the debt he owed to Richard Linklater for inspiring him to make Clerks; now he needs to be just as vocal about his debt to Judd Apatow. While it’s true that Apatow’s films have walked a path blazed in part by Smith’s early works, Zack & Miri feels like an all-out Apatow aping. The casting of Seth Rogen is just the most obvious part of that – this film is so steeped in Apatovian feeling that Smith even has Gerry Bednob showing up. The story itself also has the warm-hearted Apatow feeling that Smith movies have never quite gone for; while both directors celebrate the lives of stunted men, Smith’s movies have always had more of an edge to them, a venomous edge that Apatow’s work is completely missing. This is a film about a group of people getting together to make an amateur porno and yet everybody feels like a complete innocent, something very removed from the cynical, angrier characters that usually populate Kevin Smith films.

It’s that innocence that makes Smith stumble. One of the problems I’ve seen with Apatow films is that they never have bad guys, robbing the stories of larger conflict. There are also no bad guys in Zack & Miri and, with one exception, the main characters experience no stumbling blocks on their way to making a porn film. It feels like an earlier draft of the script or cut of the movie had Bednob in some kind of antagonist role – he’s being set up from the start as a stumbling block for Zack and Miri’s plans to shoot a porno in his coffee shop after hours – but that never pays off. The only conflict in the film is whether or not lifelong friends Zack & Miri will have their relationship change after fucking on camera… duh. The lack of conflict means that the cast of misfits who surround Zack and Miri become nothing more than wallpaper.

That Apatovian influence has led to a loosening of the Kevin Smith dialogue, which had been approaching Mametian levels of self-parody lately (I should have said ‘Smithian dialogue’ in this sentence). The film opens much like Juno does (in spirit), with a lot of stylized dialogue that eventually turns into something a little more comfortable. This time the words feel like they belong in the mouths of the characters as opposed to having been jammed in there by Smith. This makes everything funnier – there’s a certain distance that you get from the funny lines in previous Kevin Smith movies because they sound like lines and not like natural human discussion. By hiring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, Smith has tapped into a talent pool that can make his dialogue sound like something they just thought up.

Yeah, I know, that’s the basis of acting, but it’s been something in short supply in previous Smith films. It’s not like Zack & Miri is dripping in it either – with a few exceptions Banks and Rogen are surrounded by actors with only the most rudimentary grasp of the craft. Jason Mewes is playing somebody who isn’t Jay and he’s completely unable to bring any life to the role. His flat, affectless performance is a little eerie – I kept expecting to find out that his character is actually a serial killer. It’s like Mewes is either hyper or asleep, and he’s mostly asleep here. That does come in handy during the scenes where he’s ‘acting’ in the porno, but to be honest there’s only a small degree of difference between Mewes in the rest of the film and Mewes in those scenes.

The other members of the porno troupe disappoint mightily as well, although a lot of that may come from the fact that these characters are thinner than the paper on which their dialogue is printed. Stiffness and awkwardness rule the day with Traci Lords and Jeff Anderson (who is so one note that I don’t even understand why he’s still an actor), while real life porn star Katie Morgan is bubbly and cute but seemingly unaware that she’s in a movie with these other people. And then there’s this other blonde dude – I don’t even know his character’s name. He’s a nothing.

The exception to this is Craig Robinson, who steals the movie at every frame. His line delivery is almost miraculous; it feels like Craig Robinson could make a reading of the names on the AIDS Quilt uproarious. He’s also the only supporting character who has a character, whose life feels like it continues outside the sprocket holes of the celluloid. Jeff Anderson, by contrast, feels like he probably walks into a closet and leans his head against the wall silently between takes. Robinson gives hints of being a true comic genius, and I hope that his ascent continues apace- after larger roles this film and Pineapple Express and The Office, Robinson feels ready for something bigger.

He does leave a little bit of movie to be stolen by Justin Long who is incredible as the visiting gay porn star who sparks Zack and Miri’s plan to make a porno to pay their rent. He eschews the swishy homo stereotype and plays his character like some kind of bizarrely masculine 40s actor. He’s great, and in the film far too little. On the other hand Brandon Routh, who plays his lover and co-star as a gay Clark Kent, fits in pretty well with the other bad actors Smith has assembled.

All of these performances, good and bad, surround Rogen and Banks, who have a surprising amount of chemistry. Kevin Smith’s women have rarely been noteworthy, but Miri feels real and rounded, and not just like a guy with tits (although her character does on more than one occasion skirt that). I recently called Banks a movie star and was corrected by readers on the message board, but I think the problem is that they haven’t seen this movie. She is a movie star here. There are not enough roles for women who are good actresses, funny AND beautiful, so Banks doesn’t get many opportunities to shine, but when she gets that chance here it’s full-on movie star time. I don’t know if this movie will be launching her into the stratosphere as she deserves, but I do think it’ll win over everyone who sees it into her fanclub.

Rogen, meanwhile, has already won everyone who will see this movie. He’s playing yet another Seth Rogen character – a lovable schlub who needs to grow up and understand what’s best for him – but at least this time he’s playing a Seth Rogen character with a little bit of motivation. I’ve made no secret of my fannish attitude towards Rogen, but this is a role he could probably play in his sleep; it would have been interesting to see him play a version of Zack that Smith would have written for Ben Affleck, maybe. Just a version of the character a little bit outside of what we expect. All of that said, Rogen is the heart of the movie. Zack and Miri get dual title billing, but the film is really about Zack, and even when things take a dreadful, maudlin turn at the end, Rogen (aided by Craig Robinson, the MVP of Seth Rogen movies this year) keeps things humming.

With all of this picking apart of the film I’ve failed to mention one thing about Zack & Miri Make a Porno – it’s funny. It falls back on a couple of too obvious Smithisms – seriously, no more fucking Star Wars jokes, please – but more often than not Zack & Miri will elicit genuine laughs. And it has a lot of heart to go with those laughs. It just has no story, tension or stakes. The film, ultimately, is really pleasant (even with the extreme sexuality, the extraordinarily lewd comedy and the edge-pushing scatalogical scene); it doesn’t ask too much of you and it doesn’t overstimulate you. You’ll laugh, basically appreciate the characters and then go home and forget most of the movie outside of a couple of lines of scenes. In baseball terms it’s a very solid double, and for a filmmaker who has been striking out wildly for the last few movies, that’s a nice improvement.

I don’t expect to speak for what Kevin Smith’s plans are, but Zack & Miri feels like he’s rebooting himself. While he hasn’t turned into Neveldine & Taylor, Smith and his original DP, David Klein, make Zack & Miri a film that is often visually dynamic. Or at least interesting and not static. The movie, freed of the fanwank of the ‘Askewniverse,’ has the ability to be its own thing, and Smith gets to be a guy telling a story as opposed to being the mythological version of Kevin Smith. I hope that this is a reboot, that Zack & Miri represent Smith taking stock of his last couple of films and getting himself back on track. Having reached his career nadir with Clerks II, one of the worst films of the 21st century, Smith had nowhere to go but up, but Zack & Miri represents a strong step up towards a new, better place. I’ve given Smith a lot of shit over the years – here’s hoping that Zack & Miri begins a streak that has me eating my words.