Overall Rating
  Awesome: 31.11%
Worth A Look: 32.59%
Average: 4.44%
Pretty Bad: 5.93%
Total Crap: 25.93%
7 reviews, 93 user ratings
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| Clerks 2 |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Like a visit with old friends. With dick jokes."
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Kevin Smith's "Clerks II" is to his original "Clerks" what Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset" was to his original "Before Sunrise." Both sequels revisit the director's favorite characters about a decade later, examining how life and the clock have taken their toll. And both are ideally seen as bookend pieces, to be watched one after the other. (Amusingly, the Smith/Linklater analogy extends to the characters being animated in the interim between films -- Linklater's couple in a cameo in "Waking Life," Smith's counter jockeys in ABC's short-lived "Clerks" cartoon.) In Linklater's world, people philosophize; in Smith's world, people philosophize, with dick jokes.Smith opens Clerks II in grainy black-and-white, in winking emulation of the original's (financially necessary) style. Dante (Brian O'Halloran) slouches over to the Quick Stop convenience store for another day at work, and finds it on fire. He and buddy Randal (Jeff Anderson), who works at the adjoining video store, are now out of a job. So they find themselves flipping burgers at Mooby's, the film's cow-themed answer to McDonald's (which first reared its fattening head in Smith's Dogma). After a year of this, Dante is ready to move on, and finds his "golden ticket" in Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach, Smith's wife), a well-meaning but dull blonde who wants to whisk Dante away to Florida, where he'll work at her father's car wash. It sounds like the soul-killing fate worse than death endured by the men in Brokeback Mountain, marrying into respectability at the expense of what they actually want.
Randal, terrified of having his friendship with Dante construed as gay, would take issue with that comparison. But Clerks II gets at the heart of (non-sexual) love between men at least as knowingly as the Ang Lee film. Women like Emma seek to break that bond, whereas women like Becky (Rosario Dawson), Dante's boss at Mooby's, at least respect it even if they don't quite understand it. The movie also brings back Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith himself), heterosexual lifemates who don't seem to bother with the opposite sex very much, though Jay boasts of his alleged exploits loudly and often. In a key scene, Randal lets Dante know how much he'll miss him when Dante moves away, and the moment carries more punch than a comparable scene would between Dante and a woman.
So far, Clerks II doesn't sound like a lot of laughs. But there is raunchy fun to be had here; the infamous "donkey show" scene that Joel Siegel walked out on is wild without being particularly explicit. And Randal has a new foil in a weirdly dorky Mooby's employee, Elias (Trevor Fehrman), who worships Transformers and Lord of the Rings with a fervor that offends Randal's Star Wars-loving sensibilities. If Clerks II has a flaw, it's that Dante and Randal don't have enough screen time together -- but then, the very form of the movie makes us feel Randal's gradual estrangement from Dante.
How do you reconcile the desire to be true to yourself with the desire to make something of yourself? Clerks II strikes a balance, though with the unlikely deus ex machina help of Jay and Silent Bob. (Which may be Smith's way of saying that those two have been very, very good to him.) The movie sort of ends up where the original Clerks began, with a significant difference."Clerks II" will resonate with viewers in Smith's age range (mid-thirties) in a way that goes beyond comedy, just as the first one did with twentysomethings. It also, of course, finds time for obscene riffs on everything from gay hobbits to "The Silence of the Lambs." It's clear by now that Smith is comfortable in his Quick Stop and isn't in any hurry to burn it down.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14852&reviewer=416
originally posted: 07/25/06 14:32:45
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USA
21-Jul-2006 (R)
DVD: 28-Nov-2006
UK
22-Sep-2006
Australia
31-Aug-2006
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