In interviews and on his podcast, Kevin Smith has openly discussed how, as a ‘middle-aged’ stoner, practically anything nowadays can make him emotional, including the trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the loss of Stan Lee, or even a meme about his friend and frequent collaborator Sadfleck (sad Ben Affleck), which left the writer/director/actor bawling his eyes out. His long-awaited film Clerks III is his cinematic testament to a kind of emotional maturity and openness about life’s unexpected disruptions and near-misses. Of course, there are also plenty of dick jokes and comic book movie debates to go around as well. Come on, it’s a Kevin Smith film.
Opening with My Chemical Romance’s ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, itself a kind of nostalgic hymn for lost childhood, Clerks III, like its predecessors, revolves around the mundane lives of convenience store workers Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson), now almost thirty years older than they were in Clerks (1994). Age has caught up with these nerdy outsiders, a fact that hits home even more when Randal suffers a ‘widow-maker’ heart attack in the middle of Quick Stop Groceries. Left to confront his own mortality, Randal takes it upon himself to finally do something with his life and transform his existence watching, talking about, and criticising pop culture into a filmmaking venture himself. So, along with Dante, Elias (a scene-stealing Trevor Fehrman), Jay, Silent Bob and an assortment of other familiar faces, Randal cobbles together a black-and-white indie comedy about life working behind the counter as a convenience store clerk.
If all of this is sounding vaguely familiar, it’s because like many of Smith’s efforts, Clerks III exists in a meta-fictional world where the blending of fiction and reality are welcomed alongside so many celebrity cameos, self-deprecating in-jokes and pop culture references. Like Randal, Smith himself suffered the same kind of heart attack in 2018 (the severity of which put his chances of survival at only 20%), and like his protagonist, the writer-director similarly took it as a warning to turn his life around, opting for a vegan diet and radical weight loss to turn the tide.
Clerks III plays out as a reflection upon aging and mortality through the incredibly personal lens of Smith’s own lived experience, a distillation of the director’s life as well as his, at times, incredibly personal filmography. You can feel Smith speaking through these characters to discuss his own thoughts on mortality and the desire to leave a mark on the world. But unlike the self-important seriousness of a Tarantino script, Smith is unafraid to poke fun at himself and his films, his successes and his failures. If anything, Clerks III is not a game-changing new installment in the so-called ‘Viewaskewniverse‘ narrative, but a celebration of the fact that the first film, made by a bunch of friends on a shoestring budget, ever got made at all, and the joyousness Smith obviously feels that he is able to continue doing what he loves to do.
Fans of Clerks or other comedies helmed by Smith like Jay and Silent Bob: Reboot (2019) or Mallrats (1995) may initially be caught off guard by the film’s comparative tenderness and, in some moments, often matter-of-fact confrontations with life and death. Yes, there is crude comedy (Jay and Silent Bob now run a weed dispensary, so you can pretty much predict how that turns out) but I would be lying if said that the film didn’t need a few more comedy set-piece moments to offset its moments of pathos. But at the same time, the film’s rumination upon both Randal and Dante’s lives and how each handle unexpected disasters and life-changing events showcases the more serious strand of Smith’s writing, seen infrequently across his filmography, but most readily embodied by something like Chasing Amy (1997).
Blending this self-reflection with a meta third-act revisiting of the first Clerks and its production, Clerks III is a charming monument to the director’s own career and passion for making films with his buddies, but one that is entirely dependent upon your admiration for Smith’s filmography and personality. If you’re not one for his brand of filmmaking, it would probably be best to avoid this like an after-hours bachelor party at Mooby’s. If you do, then I assure you, Clerks III won’t be a waste of your time.
Notes from the Multiplex 