clerks II
7 out of 10
It's a huge relief to see that Kevin Smith has managed to bounce back from the cinematic travesty that was Jersey Girl. Sure, I've seen worse movies, but Jersey Girl was definitely painful viewing. It was so bad that I completely forgive Smith's retreat to his cinematic home-turf of dick and fart jokes. I hope he doesn't give up on his aspirations toward more meaningful cinema, because his writing has real soul, but until he hones his filmmaking through experience, his humor will beat out any drama and emotion.
Clerks 2 felt very familiar, but I've watched the original film a half-dozen times and the many more times I've watched the six lonely episodes of the clerks animated series. The cartoon is actually my favorite incarnation, delivering Dante and Randal as pure archetypes stuck in a Quick-Stop sitcom hell. The cheap animation was even more primitive than Smith's directing, but it delivered jokes at a breakneck speed. One episode alone featured a bad High School reunion, Randal's repugnance creating dozens of lesbians, the first on-screen appearance of The Kid in the Helmet, and a triple plot homage-to/satire-of The Bad News Bears, The Last Starfighter, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I'm still disappointed a live-action film took precedence over an animated one. Partly because I love cartoons. But mostly because clerks 2 lacked the energy of first clerks, let alone the schizophrenic pacing of the cartoon.
When Randal burns down the Quick-Stop, they're forced (by New Jersey's surprising rarity of convenience stores) to take jobs at the Mooby's fast food chain created as a golden-calf riff in Smith's Dogma. Dante has a hot but slightly bitchy fiancé and they're moving to Florida (in what looks like the same station wagon from Mallrats) which freaks out Randal more than he'd like to admit, so of course he does all that he can to sabotage everything. Luckily for Dante, the Mooby's manager is also hot for him, pregnant with his kid, and looks like Rosario Dawson. The choice is obvious, but Dante is a dithering idiot so we've got time for a couple crude discussions, some scathing analyses of pop culture, a musical number and a donkey sex show. Oh, yeah, there's some Jay and Silent Bob, doing their shtick, quality as always, but set clearly in the background.
It's funny stuff, but stretched a little thin over a minimal 90 minutes. Some scenes are too long, others are just flat from ponderous editing. While Crazy Christian Co-worker is a fair foil for Randal's rants, he's also just as annoying and creepy as the CCC you know. The character's eventual drunken debauchery is such an obvious twist that it barely earns a chuckle. Randal's riff on Lord of the Rings or Jay and Silent Bob's newfound faith are great, but never reach the hilarity of the Death Star union-workers discussion or J&SB's solo adventures.
Many of the best moments of clerks (including "You mean I have to drink this coffee hot?" and "Ooh! Navy Seals!") came from the montages, a stylistic element with a high joke-per-minute that's completely absent from clerks 2. There aren't legions of bad customers, only a few outrageous incidents involving cameo appearances. Speaking of cameos, I'm not sure why Jason Lee wasn't playing one of his earlier Kevin Smith characters, since both Banky and Brodie could irritate Randal with ridiculous success and yet were dumb enough to sport the incredibly bad idea for facial hair that's in Lee's contract for My Name is Earl.
It's not that clerks 2 is a bad movie, it just doesn't deliver nearly as many laughs as Smith's earlier work. It feels like a film rushed into production when he should have spent more time adding gags to the screenplay. Despite falling short of the standard it manages to be entertaining, at least on first viewing, and it goes along way toward redeeming Smith after Jersey Girl.
Directed and written by Kevin Smith; Starring Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Rosario Dawson, and Jason Mewes
Viewed on 04Aug2006 at Century Eastport #12
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