Clerks II

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Writer/director Kevin Smith always seems to be a bone of contention among movie geeks. Some delight in his stream-of-consciousness, who-cares-about-the-plot style of filmmaking, while others trash him as a one-trick pony. After all, every single full-length movie he's ever made has had Jay and Silent Bob in it, except Jersey Girl, which Smith, it seems, would rather have us forget.

Me, I've grown to respect him. The original Clerks, made in 1994 on a budget financed by Smith's own maxed out credit cards, was kind of a minor masterpiece. Essentially an ode to slackers and Star Wars geeks, a typical scene involved a rumination on the morality of blowing up the second Death Star while it was still being constructed by independent contractors just trying to make a living. Mallrats was pretty sub-par, but Dogma was a generally earnest deliberation on Catholicism that proved Smith could actually write a plot.

Take a close look at Clerks II, though, and you'll realize that Smith actually has a very strange style that I can't recall anyone ever trying before, at least to the extent that he has here. It's essentially a fusing of two polar opposite genres: the gross-out comedy and the gooey-sappy drama. You realize while watching this that Smith has grown up, and can't resist the urge to be more sentimental. But then the next scene involves a donkey and a man doing something rather unspeakable.

In fact, the sheer crudeness of many parts of the film led Good Morning America's Joel Siegel make news recently when he stormed out of a screening at the forty minute mark. But when you see a Kevin Smith film, you should be prepared for that; the man, now more than ever, has no shame. What I wasn't prepared for were drippy scenes like the montage set to an Alanis Morissette song, where our hero sits in his car and waves to a little girl, imagining the family he's never been a part of. I suppose I should explain what's going on. As the movie opens, our New Jersey hero Dante Hicks goes to open the Quik-Mart where he works. It's on fire. Flash-forward to about a year later, and him and his best friend Randall Graves are now working at a fast food chain called Mooby's. However, it's Dante's last day, as he's about to move to Florida with his new fiancé.

For a good forty-five minutes, that's pretty much the only plot there is to speak of. But in Kevin Smith movies, the conversations aren't there to kill time in between the plot; it's more the other way around. So we get plenty of dialogue that's vintage Smith, and the nice thing about it is that the dialogue really works as a comment on the characters, too. For example, in the twelve years since the first Clerks, Lord of the Rings has taken ...