Yoga Hosers

[StevePulaski]

Yoga Hosers (2016)
Directed by: Kevin Smith

Harley Quinn Smith and Lily-Rose Depp.

Rating: ★

You never have to question whether or not director Kevin Smith had fun making a particular film, especially when you consider his most recent film before Yoga Hosers, Tusk, both of which belong in his new "True North Trilogy." Tusk was a wild, often unsettling horror-comedy, with a twisted sense of suspense and lengthy, slowburn build-up that worked its way to the bizarre ending patiently and effectively. Yoga Hosers takes all of Tusk's charm, from its nuances of Canadian dialect to the indisputable strangeness of the plot, and overdoes on both, making a borderline insufferable film that easily stands as his worst.

Yoga Hosers exists as one long, absurd, eighty-one minute Canuck joke. Like a perpetually annoying, Borat-esque tourist, all Smith can do with this film is making fun of the way Canadians say "about," despite the "aboot" cliche being factually incorrect, on top of infusing it with a copious amount of miniature, sentinel bratwursts filled with sauerkraut running around, wailing on-screen. All of this shows that maybe Smith hasn't run out of ideas, but he doesn't know how to manage his time effectively.

The film revolves around two young, fourteen-year-old Canadian girls both named Colleen (played by Lily-Rose Depp and Harley Quinn Smith, the daughters of Johnny Depp and Kevin Smith, respectively), who work at Eh-2-Zed, a grocery store on the outskirts of Manitoba. The two are yoga-crazed, phone-obsessed adolescents, who pass the time by playing in their pop punk garage band or visiting Yogi Bayer (Justin Long), the local yoga instructor, because the two Colleens can't bring themselves to do yoga in their gym class. One day, the girls learn in school about a "Canadian Führer" known as Adrien Arcand (Haley Joel Osment), who helped govern a powerful Canadian Nazi Party in the True North, until he was arrested, leaving only his Andronicus Arcane (Ralph Garman), whose whereabouts are unknown to this day.

When the Colleens invite two morons into the Eh-2-Zed one night for a late party, the guys reveal themselves to be Satanists, but just before they can sacrifice the girls, a foot-long hunk of bratwurst inserts himself into their rectums before trying to assault the girls. The Colleens wind up running into Guy LaPointe (Johnny Depp), the man-hunter from Tusk, who assists them in trying to find the whereabouts of Arcane in addition to the origins of these "Bratzis" (played by Kevin Smith).

There's so much that Yoga Hosers could've been if it didn't end up being so much about nothing. Elements present in the film allude to potential for commentary about a generation obsessed with insignificant, pop-culture "phenomenons," wacky science-fiction with an actual plot that isn't assembled off of poking fun at an idea group of people, and even a comic showcase for Depp and Smith's daughter as if they were the female Dante and Randal from Clerks. All of these ideas are hopelessly squandered in a film that keeps laughing at its own joke, which is fine, so long as it doesn't make the audience suffer for nearly an hour and a half of the same drudgery.

It's hard to judge whether Lily-Rose and Harley Quinn are good actors or not when they're essentially acting in a family reunion of nonsense, accompanied by familiar faces like Jason Mewes, Natasha Lyonne, and Adam Brody. If anything, they're done a disservice in a film that doesn't give them any kind of halfway decent material nor characters to work with, save for the occasional Guy LaPointe quip or the most consistently funny soul of the bunch, Long's Yogi Bayer character.

I've long been a fan of Kevin Smith, going as far as to declare his first four films (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Dogma) comedic masterpieces all across the vast plane of comedy. Having said that, after a stellar start to a new, unforeseen trilogy, Yoga Hosers smothers any kind of likability this trilogy had going for it by simply saying that he doesn't take it seriously, and practically laughing at his fans for doing the same.

Starring: Lil-Rose Depp, Harley Quinn Smith, Johnny Depp, Ralpha Garman, Justin Long, Haley Joel Osment, Natasha Lyonne, and Kevin Smith. Directed by: Kevin Smith.