MOVIE REVIEW: Clerks III

The man who almost made Superman live has put in yet another installment to the Clerks franchise. Intended for those who have seen any of the films in the Askewniverse either in theaters or off on Netflix while being sober enough to actually recall the lore featured within the series.

Clerks III to an extent is a loose biopic, similar in the vein to the Clerks film that started it all, director Kevin Smith uses each character in the film as a foil for himself and this sequel in general as a form of documented catharsis for his life. Given that a few years ago Smith suffered a nearly fatal heart attack, the film’s focus plays on both on Clerks turned store owners, Randall and Dante each suffering from their own heart attacks and subsequently dealing with their mortality in their own separate ploys for making peace with their life behind the counter and outside of the store.

There are many self referential points in the film that make the viewing of the previous two Clerks a prerequisite and the script makes no excuses about it. With plenty of pop culture references from prayers to Crom to T-shirts ranging from King Diamond designs to Dynamite Comics back issues, it’s funny how the director is so vocal against ComicsGate, but essentially made a film for the ComicsGate audience.
Clerks III isn’t exactly welcoming, and the kids that were smoking in ’94 or in the late 2000’s when part two came out only grew up to be an audience that did not at all feel inviting.

In my front row seat, I felt like a guest who wasn’t welcome in Dante and Randall’s shop, but I still stayed and observed – just as Kevin Smith intended audience members to do since his first film. And though there may have been one penial joke too many, and the cameos didn’t carry the same zeal as a Jay and Silent Bob standalone, I got to see Rosario Dawson on the big screen, which is always a pleasure.

Dawson reprising her role as Becky provided the heart of the movie undoubtedly, while side characters such as the journalist and the native customers themselves injected some soul into a film that otherwise would have been very dry – a problem that was present in the first stop at The Quikstop in ’94. Other than Dawson’s shining role, another plus of the film could be found in the process of making a film that Smith reveals to audiences throughout the duration of the picture.

With stagehand terms thrown around and nearly every seen capturing a view behind the lens, fans of the ’94 Clerks get to sit back for nearly two hours and experience a facsimile of what it would have been like to film that cult classic.
That experience in itself is special and takes a degree of imagination that only a cinema lumineer like Kevin Smith has and must be recognized. Cult classics cant be duplicated, but Smith in a unique way has come mighty damn close with Clerks III.

Though audiences will have to be familiar with a majority of nerd culture and a (loose) history of the Askewniverse to completely follow whats going on, for those like myself who have outgrown Euro-America’s obsession with jokes focused around the phallus, the drama and existentialist concepts that glue together Clerks III hold this dusted off museum skeleton of a franchise long enough to at least be admired for a (run)time before cinema purists move on to something bigger and decidedly mature.

Score : 2/5

Release date: September 13, 2022

Director: Kevin Smith

Screenplay: Kevin Smith

Producers: Kevin Smith, Jordan Monsanto, Elizabeth Destro

Music composed by: James L. Venable