Clerks III (2022).
What you get out of Clerks III is highly dependent on your relationship with Kevin Smith movies. Watching Clerks for the first time was a very memorable experience for me. I started working at the video store around 1999, and up to that point, the films I had seen were either rented by my parents (which meant that if my mom rented it, it was the newest PG-13 blockbuster film that was in-stock and if my dad rented it, it was something starring Steven Seagal, Jean Claude Van Damme, or one of Martin Sheen’s offspring) or almost anything that came out in theaters between 1996 and 1999 because one of the guys in our group had a brother who worked at the movie theater and would let us in for free. There was a girl named Becky who I had a thing for who worked at the grocery store connected to the video store who was a few years older than me, who asked me if I had seen Clerks. Of course I hadn’t. I checked it out that night and we went to her house to watch it and I loved it. I mean, it was almost like looking at a reflection of us, her on the grocery side, me on the video side, dealing with the bizarre customers and interpersonal relationships that are retail and rental.
Shortly after, I bought the VHS tape of Clerks at Suncoast Video and watched it countless times. Once I got a DVD player, Clerks was one of the first discs I bought. When the Clerks X deluxe DVD package came out, I bought that too, and I’m pretty sure I forced my roommate and fellow list nerd Shaun to watch it, along with the multiple featurettes and commentary tracks. I loved it. I still love it. I was a View Askew nerd. Once I got Internet access (which I think was around 2000, 2001), I was on the View Askew message boards, talking shit with other fans of Kevin Smith’s films. In part, his story inspired me to want to make films. Hell, the very first thing I ever wrote, which was typed up in a word processor, was kind of a Dogma ripoff.
But at some point, I feel like I grew out of Clerks. I grew out of working at the video store. I certainly grew out of liking Becky. In 2006, I went to see Clerks II in theaters, and after the utter disaster that I felt Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was, I had low expectations. The film didn’t even muster to meet those. While I got a small amount of joy hanging out with those people again, it just didn’t do anything for me. I have never rewatched it, and honestly, I don’t have the hankering to watch my Clerks Blu-ray, which is still sitting sealed on my shelf. But one thing has remained, and that’s that I will always try to support Kevin Smith, even if, outside of Red State, his movies post-Chasing Amy have done nothing for me. I like him as a person and I think that his non-View Askew ideas have been really interesting, even if they haven’t hit the mark for me. He also really seems to value his fans, like with his roadshow tours, and he just seems like a really genuine guy who, quite frankly, inspires me.
Anyway, Clerks III came out this summer and I didn’t get a chance to see it in theaters, so I bought the 4K Steelbook from Lionsgate which looks pretty awesome. Again, low expectations going in because I thought Jay & Silent Bob Reboot was terrible. Clerks III is about Dante and Randall, still played by Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, now almost 50, still working at the Quik Stop. After Randall has a heart attack, he comes up with an idea to make a film about his life working at the Quik Stop. I realized then that this was going to be Kevin Smith exercising his feelings about his own heart attack by almost making an autobiography about the making of the original Clerks. Part biopic, part mortality examination. The heart attack scene has a surprising amount of heart woven within the ridiculous dick jokes, as we learn that the love of Dante’s life, Becky, died shortly after the events of Clerks II. Becky visits Dante several times in the film as Dante, 16 years later, is still wrestling with his grief. Most of the rest of the film is about the making of Clerks, recreating many of those scenes I’d seen so many times on that worn VHS tape, impressively bringing back even the bit actors to recreate them. Outside of a few snickers, none of the jokes really landed for me, but I’m always a bit amused by the inter-store pop-culture arguments and observations. The film is predictable, but when we got to the end of the second act and the two leads have their inevitable argument that splits them up going into the third act so we can all root for them to reconcile, there’s an absolute gut punch that kind of left me reeling, and a lot of that reeling was due to the acting of Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson. When we finally get to the scene where Randall shows Dante the finished film, the amount of pain, fear, and overwhelming sadness in the eyes of both men fucking hit me. Jeff Anderson was always my favorite part of Clerks, but he is so good in this scene that I would put him up against almost any actor and I bet he would hold his own.
As Dante watches the film, we see those scenes from 1994. Not the remade scenes, but the original scenes, as Dante would have remembered them, as I remembered them. And I watched alongside him, crying like a little girl with a skinned knee. It wasn’t just that these characters weren’t going to have a Hollywood ending, or Dante having some closure, it was me realizing that I was probably never going to see these characters again. These characters who I spent so much time with during the early 00’s. These characters who other people just don’t understand like I do. Characters who are kind of a part of me, who I quote still today on a regular basis, who I used to come back to for comfort, and even after all these years, picked up right where we left off. I probably won’t remember the first two-thirds of Clerks III, but I’ll never forget the last third. It’s the rawest, most honest Kevin Smith work that I’ve seen in 25 years. Your enjoyment of Clerks III will absolutely hinge on your history with the films. If you’re coming in without having seen the other movies or just saw the films recently, you probably won’t get as much out of it…I can guarantee that Moose and my wife would hate this film. But, if you grew up with them, I hope that the bittersweet wrap-up impacts you the way that it did me. There’s a voiceover that was cut from the end of the film that explains how Randall went on to make movies until he was 90, and I hope that Kevin Smith is able to do just that, making the films he wants, with the characters he clearly loves.
As usual with Kevin Smith films, the disc is packed with extras. The disc boots with a two-minute snippet from the director thanking you for purchasing physical media, because the sales of the last film he made on Blu-ray gave Lionsgate the confidence to move forward with this film. As usual there’s a Kevin Smith commentary featuring actors Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Trever Fehrman, and Austin Zajur, nearly thirty minutes of deleted scenes, and two feature length documentaries on the disc. Those documentaries are The Clerks III documentary, which is an hour and a half and is filled with interviews and the story of how the film got made, and We’re Not Even Supposed to Be Here Today: Three Decades of Clerks which runs an hour and fifteen minutes and is more about the legacy of the series.
