A Quick Attack
Let's return, once again, to that fabled convenience store. 2022's Clerks III is nowhere near as good as the original, though it's more interesting than Clerks II. Writer/director Kevin Smith seems at first as though he's going for a straightforward nostalgia trip but then he does something interesting at the end of the second act. The fact that something really works about the film mostly makes me wish all the more that several other things about it had been different.
We catch up with Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) living their lives as normal, managing the Quick Stop and playing hockey on the roof. Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) have taken over the video store to run it as a legal marijuana dispensary but also hang out in front as they always used to. One day, when Randal is arguing about religion with his hardcore Christian employee Elias (Trevor Fehrman), he suffers a heart attack.
Amy Sedaris makes an amusing appearance as Randal's doctor and, against steep odds, he pulls through. Realising his life has amounted to nothing, he decides to make a movie. That movie turns out to be the original Clerks.
The influence of Kevin Smith's own life is obvious. A couple years ago, Smith himself had a heart attack. The most interesting aspect of the film is ultimately how this experience affects both Randal and Dante and we can see in it Smith's contemplation of just how close he was to death. It's interesting enough that I wish he'd done a few other things.
I would have encouraged him to re-cast Dante. Brian O'Halloran simply can't act and he has several emotional scenes in the film that come off particularly odd because he's working with Rosario Dawson, who's a great actress. Smith ought to have recast the role in Clerks II.
I also wish he'd gone for slower pacing in the emotional scenes and not been so busy with camera tricks. The constant comparison to the original Clerks shows that some of the minimalism that was forced on Smith due to a lower budget happened to have been what made that movie work.
I would have also recommended either spending a year working at a convenience store again or changing Dante and Randall's jobs to entertainment journalists. Another thing that made the original Clerks work is its feeling of authenticity, of coming from someone who was actually living that life. This new film talks compulsively about movie production and the inside of the entertainment industry because that's what Smith deals with now in his life. The veneer of it being about a couple of convenience store managers feels empty and pointless.
Jay and Silent Bob are still good characters. Jason Mewes has really fake teeth now that make him look slightly like George Hamilton, but that kind of fits for an aging pothead.
All in all, not a great movie but not a waste of time if you've been following Smith's films so far.