Much as he did with Jay & Silent Bob Reboot a few years ago, Clerks III has Kevin Smith returning to the good ol’ days with a threequel to the film that started it all. And somehow, we’ve gone even more meta than Reboot, as this sequel to Clerks is… well, about making the movie Clerks.
As much as I want to point out that Kevin Smith technically already made a movie about the making of his first movie with Zack & Miri Make A Porno, the number of people in-film who openly question if Dante and Randall are making a porno suggests that Smith is at least aware of that. To that end, the film’s approach to metafiction sits way easier than it did with Reboot, as while this does involve revisiting moments from the original film, they aren’t just repeated with better camera quality. Instead, Smith does his introspective schtick and spends a lot of time reflecting on the surreality of the production behind the first Clerks, complete with some nice callbacks to real-life production info about it in-universe. It feels like a making-of docudrama at times, and it works pretty well.
As do the performances, which continue the View Askewniverse knack of presenting characters that you either feel like you’ve met before in your own life, or would at least like to meet in your own life. Jason Mewes and Smith are still solid as Jay & Silent Bob, Rosario Dawson reprises her role from Clerks 2 and brings some decent drama to the story, and there are some Robot Chicken-level cameos that show up for the audition of the film-within-a-film.
Then there’s Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, who definitively have never been better than they are here. Their strained ‘hetero life mate’ relationship remains strong, but their individual performances have them at their absolute peaks. Anderson serves as the author avatar for Smith, who used his real-life experience with a heart attack as inspiration for the story here, and while he’s as loud-mouthed and abrasive as ever, there’s a real feeling that this guy has survived some shit and has come out the other side wanting to be better.
As for O’Halloran, he is given the big dramatic moments of the film to work with, and he knocks them all out of the park. Him dealing with his own brush with death gives this film some serious emotional punch, and when put in conjunction with what’s going on with Randall, it makes for some of the most tear-jerking material Kevin Smith has ever made. Like, it almost seems unfair how weepy this film got me, while still earning every moment of it.
While some of the humour doesn’t hit quite the right note (the crypto jokes feel especially off, knowing what happened with Kilroy Was Here), all the little callbacks to the other two Clerks films and even other independent filmmakers help ground this as not just a fond remembrance of the start of Smith’s career, but of the DIY spirit that fuels the independent film scene. It’s sentimental, but it avoids being too self-congratulatory by delivering proper character drama, even when removed from connections to the director’s own experiences. I mean, being a fan of his work sure helps, but with the level of acting on display here, it could still work as a standalone. Well, that and some of the ingenious needle drops in this thing; I don’t think the theme from Degrassi: The Next Generation will ever be used in a better context than it is here, and I’m including the actual show itself.
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