The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
I am a huge fan of the first two Clerks movies. Although I am about ten years younger than the characters in the movies, I still feel like I grew up with them. A friend of mine (who came with me to see this one) showed me the original on VHS when I was eleven years old. I watched Clerks II, which I actually like better than the original, many times when I was in my mid-20s back when my friends and I would spend every weekend getting drunk in my basement and Clerks II was one of the movies playing in regular rotation. I adore these characters and I feel like they are old friends.
That being said, I was fucking dreading Clerks III. As much as I love Kevin Smith’s early work, he has become quite the bummer in recent years. His films in the last decade, like Tusk, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Yoga Hosers, have been absolute garbage and he has become quite a joy kill. Listening to Kevin Smith talk now is like hanging out with one of your old friends that now wants to lecture you about drinking and smoking and can’t stay out late because they need to go to Ikea in the morning. It’s depressing. I didn’t want that version of Kevin Smith making a Clerks movie and turning fun memories into depression. While Clerks III isn’t nearly as awful as his other recent movies, it is a sad shell of the first two films that I will never watch again and, frankly, I wish didn’t exist.
Inspired by Kevin Smith’s real-life heart attack, Clerks III returns us to the Quick Check with Dante and Randall, the latter of whom has a massive heart attack. Upon awakening in the hospital, he realizes that he has wasted his whole life talking about movies when he should have been actually making movies (a realization that admittedly felt like a kick to the balls for me). So he decides to make a movie, specifically he decides to make the first two Clerks movies. The rest of the movie is these guys essentially filming recreations of the first two movies, complete with the original actors from the first movie making return appearances.
The biggest problem with Clerks III is that it is almost completely made up of jokes and references from the first two movies. There is almost nothing new here. I lost count of the references to “37” or “ass-to-mouth” or any of the other jokes from the other movies. That’s all that this movie is: references to jokes that were funny the first time and I’m supposed to laugh because I remember them being funny the first time. That’s not how fucking jokes work. This is 90 minutes of people telling you stories about funny things that happened to them when they were younger, but we already have two movies that actually show those funny things. The end result is just kind of sad. Kevin Smith already even did this basic premise in the far superior Zack and Miri Make a Porno. There is just nothing here that hasn’t been done before, and usually much better, in Smith’s earlier films. It is a copy of a copy and that aint funny. I thought I was going to piss myself the first time that I saw Clerks II because I was laughing so hard. I don’t think that I even chuckled during this movie’s entire running time.
For a film that’s built entirely around being meta, this also creates some meta problems. Why is it that all of the events being depicted are from the first two movies when it is supposed to be the story of Randall’s life? Were those the only two days of this man’s life in which something interesting happened? Why does Randall have still shots of the first movie to reminisce about? Why would those pictures exist in this world? Who took those pictures? There is even a point where they start watching the original Clerks. How the fuck would that exist for the characters in the movie? It’s not even treated as a joke, like Spaceballs, it’s treated as a dramatic moment. I realize that this is nitpicking, but it really annoyed me throughout the film.
The performances are fine, but the increased drama does stretch the limits of these actors. This movie contains many dramatic monologues (so many dramatic monologues) and it’s asking a lot from these guys. Jeff Anderson still nails the cynical slacker portrayal of Randall, even if he now seems liker a sadder version of a guy that used to be fun to hang out with. Brian O’Halloran has a tougher time as Dante, as the script forces him to give endless soliloquies as if he’s auditioning for King fucking Lear and, while he does a commendable job, it is clearly outside of his comfort zone. This is definitely not a script that plays to the strengths of its performers.
Clerks III isn’t getting a national theatrical release and the only screenings are “special engagements” at select theaters. The screening that I attended included a documentary at the end of the film that included Brian O’Halloran making the comment that this is a more complex story while the first two movies were just days in the lives of these characters. By saying that, he pretty much nailed the problem with Clerks III. I didn’t want complexity and drama. I actually didn’t want a third film at all because the ending of Clerks II is so perfect. But if we were to check in on these characters every decade or so, I want to see them having fun and getting into hijinks. They will get older, sure, but I still want to have fun with these characters, not be given a sad reminder that I once did have fun with these characters and never will again.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerks_III#/media/File:Clerks_III.jpg
