Before the MCU, there was View Askew.
Independent filmmaker Kevin Smith burst onto the scene at 23 years old with Clerks (1994). The black-and-white tale of convenience store workers, one of whom wasn’t even supposed to be there that day, revolutionized moviemaking philosophy.
Smith famously made his breakout with an assortment of New Jersian brethren on the backs of $27,575 worth of maxed out credit cards. The launching pad for his alternative screen personas – the reluctant as he is whiny Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and the relentlessly raunchy Randal (Jeff Anderson) – was eventually inducted into the National Film Registry in 2019 for cultural preservation.
Clerks also kickstarted a shared universe interconnected by plotlines, rat-a-tat-tat banter about Star Wars and “Jay and Silent Bob” as a loitering Greek chorus. This was Smith’s comfort zone before he sought to give mid-budget pictures a go.
Despite Jersey Girl’s (2004) unironic high-quality, the “Bennifer” split and subsequent tabloid storm rendered the movie’s box-office chances dead upon arrival. Suddenly, Smith’s confidence in helming a Green Hornet film and a Fletch reboot on even larger budgets free-fell.
He proudly decided to head “back to the well” instead.
The well: Clerks II. The QuickStop engulfed in flames served as a gobsmack for an inciting incident. The Highlands boys would then find their second act behind a different counter at a Mooby’s fast-food restaurant. Even more daring, and certainly more polished than its predecessor, the film is chock full of subversive heart and the melancholic spirit of aging. It colored its heroes with late-in-the-game maturity points to offset Randal’s staunchest cynicisms, and rode this wave of unforeseen high emotion all the way to a 8-minute standing ovation at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
Now, after 16 years of delays, near-go’s and full-blown cancellations, Smith finally rekindled a soured relationship with Anderson, convincing him to don the backwards cap and spew rapid-fire “Randalisms” one last time. In addition to the obvious cases of borrowing from Smith’s previous work, Clerks III also quite clearly owes much to Smith’s underappreciated Zack and Miri (2008). With an ensemble set on producing an amateur adult film, Zack and Miri allowed Smith to reflect on making Clerks in the middle of the night at the same storefront where he would work during the day, with a coffee shop in place of QuickStop in this Seth Rogen-starring vehicle.
Often boldly going where he has several times before, Smith felt no regrets about sending off the unique way Clerks was filmed yet again. In his latest film, he’s replenished his nearly-shot 2014 version of Clerks III with good-old “movie about making a movie” meta fun to best highlight his growing fondness for his early filmmaking life. In doing so, he counteracts the exponentially increasing mortality confrontation occurring outside, and plenty of times, inside the frame as the film moves forward.
After Randal suffers a near-fatal heart attack in the store, he decides to make a movie about his life at the QuickStop. The movie he makes is Clerks – both optically, and quite literally at one point.
Smith drew from the priority adjustments he experienced in the aftermath of his 2018 heart attack to craft this particular pathos. The end result: a “threequel” as cathartic, intense and profound as a straight dramatic feature without a punchline, let alone several as is customary with a raucous Smith entry. You won’t hear anyone call Clerks III ‘The Godfather III of Clerks movies.’
There are blasts from the past, cameo returns and callback refrains scattered all throughout. What you have in Kevin Smith is both the Clown Prince of Comic Book Fandom and the Proud King of Kevin Smith Fan Service. He knows what the true fans want, and gives them as much, in bulk.
Jay and Silent Bob earned a reboot nobody asked for in 2019. Now, Dante and Randal finally earned their second return, and third spotlight overall, which View Askewniverse die-hards have been clamoring for since color morphed to black-and-white white during the iconic Clerks II pull-away. Back by popular demand, the ironic kicker is that they are no supermen. O’Halloran and Anderson aren’t even traditional movie actors. They are more like you: as obsessed with talking about superheroes and actors as they are with creatively escaping the 9-to-5 whether it be through midday funeral-attending, GoKarting, or a round of rooftop hockey cut to the best needle-drop in a filmography rampant with several.
Clerks III is no black parade, though– far from it. It’s a celebration of life for those who live it up on the job. At the same time, it’s a means for Dante and Randal to come to grips with the fact that, though they did not get everything they wanted out of life, they still knew what it meant to find love the entire time: because they always had each other.
See this film with all of your friends. Like Clerks II, and even the slyly beautiful, surely Clerks II-inspired revisitation T2 Trainspotting (2017) from Oscar winner Danny Boyle, Clerks III too proves sequels have the power to seduce you back to the past and produce for you the antidote to its stronghold.
Another interesting comparable is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015), an indie darling that both owes Clerks and is rife with movies-within-movies as Clerks III would come to be. Similarly to this Fault in Our Stars-reminiscent dramedy, the completion of Smith’s trilogy wages: sometimes a good movie is what’s good enough to end someone’s suffering.
It also possesses the power to let good men know that they were great men all along.
