Clerks 3 Review

What started out as a self-funded black and white movie about a couple of guys who work in a convenience store has brought about a whole universe of films, with characters from this first movie going off and making their own adventures and stories, then being brought together by one man and his life experiences. That man is Kevin Smith and that movie was Clerks. From there we have seen a lot of great movies in the View-Askew-iverse… Is Clerks 3, the 2nd Kevin Smith mid-life crisis movie, a worthy addition to the Clerks legacy, or should it have ended with a heart attack?

Title: Clerks 3
Production Company: View Askew Productions, Bondit Media Capital, Mewesings, Destro Films, Three Point Capital
Distributed by: Lionsgate
Directed by: Kevin Smith
Produced by: Liz Destro & Jordan Monsanto
Written by: Kevin Smith
Starring: Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Trevor Fehrman, Austin Zajur, Jason Mewes, Rosario Dawson, Kevin Smith
Based on: Characters by Kevin Smith
Release dates: 13 September 2022
Running time: 100 minutes
Rating: Rated R (US) / MA15+ (AUS) for pervasive language, crude sexual material, and drug content.

 

I Thought You weren’t Meant to be in Today?… Again (Story)

15 years after Dante and Randal bought the Quick Stop, the pair’s life continues much the same as before, including hockey games above the store and dealing with Jay and Silent Bob, who have taken over the former RST Video and turned it into a legal marijuana dispensary, although they still secretively deal outside the building for nostalgia’s sake. Dante, meanwhile, is still mourning the deaths of Becky and their unborn daughter Grace after a car accident in 2006, and privately sees her spirit following him around and urging him to move on. One day, while Elias and his friend Blockchain are trying to sell Randal on their new NFT kites (which contain an image of the Buddy Christ), Randal suffers a near-fatal heart attack. After the surgery, Randal’s doctor urges Dante to keep Randal’s mood up while he recovers, and warns that he is also at risk for the same kind of heart attack. Recovering afterward, Randal decides he has wasted his life and needs a new purpose, declaring he will make a movie about his and Dante’s lives at the Quick Stop.

After holding some failed auditions, Randal decides he will not only write and direct but also star in the film as himself, alongside Dante in a supporting role. Rather than cast actors, they decide to cast their friends and actual customers to play themselves. This includes Jay, Silent Bob, and Veronica, the latter of whom agrees after rekindling her romance with Dante. Dante takes on the producer role and convinces his ex-fianceé Emma to loan the production $30,000 with Dante’s half of the Quick Stop as collateral. Jay and Silent Bob are brought on as cinematographers (with Silent Bob deciding to shoot the film in black-and-white), and Elias and Blockchain serve as production assistants.

As the shoot for the tentatively-titled Inconvenience continues, Dante grows increasingly frustrated with Randal’s micromanaging direction and perceived disrespect towards him in the script. After Randal tries to recreate the donkey show at Mooby’s, Dante panics and abandons filming due to the location reminding him of Becky. At a night shoot attended by a local student reporter at the Quick Stop, Dante finally explodes at Randal for never respecting him or acknowledging his support over the years, and for forcing him to relive the worst moment of his life (i.e. Becky’s death), before he too suffers a heart attack. When Randal decides to leave Dante at the hospital to continue work on the movie, Elias yells at him for his behavior and reveals Dante’s deal with Emma.

Fueled by guilt, Randal finishes editing the movie and sneaks back into the hospital with Jay and Silent Bob’s help. He shows Dante the finished film, which he has re-edited so that Dante is the main character, declaring that the story was always about him. Dante watches the film with the spirit of Becky, appreciative of his friend’s gesture before he dies peacefully at the hospital. Sometime later, Emma arrives at the Quick Stop to take over the store, or to collect the $30,000 she loaned Dante. At the last second, Blockchain arrives and excitedly reveals that the NFT kites sold out immediately, making him and Elias millionaires overnight. Elias, who has joined Randal as co-owner of the store in Dante’s stead, uses his share of their earnings to pay back Emma. As Elias, Blockchain, Jay, and Silent Bob go off to fly one of their kites, Randal privately mourns Dante at the cash register, unknowingly joined by his spirit. The film ends on a wide shot of the store, as Jay’s daughter Milly, who has joined the store as a clerk, inspects the expiration dates on some oat milk.

The Quick Stop Roster (Characters)

• Brian O’Halloran as Dante Hicks
  The man who was the stand-in for Kevin Smith through the other two Clerks movies takes a very weird side step in Clerks 3 to the point where he becomes more of a stand-in for the audience who have had to put up with Kevin Smith and the repeated talk of his own heart attack over the last 4 years. Just like everyone who has listened to all the bullshit excuses and personal life talk Smith has done for the last 3 years, Dante put up with all the talk from Randal and having him take over the main role in not only the “Clerks” film, but life itself, eventually getting so pissed off with the whole situation, exploding in a fit of anger, then walking away from everything through the act of death. The projection is there for those who have walked away from Smith and his more recent stupid movie choice (Yoga Hosers) or wrecking of TV classics (Masters of the Universe) while throwing someone else under the bus (ClownfishTV… Look them up). As someone who was a long-time Kevin Smith fan, I really felt for Dante on a personal level and a writing level. Almost as if Smith actually knew where he went wrong with his fanbase and turned them into another character.
• Jeff Anderson as Randal Graves
  The new Kevin Smith stand-in character for the most part. After having a heart attack in the Quick Stop, Randal goes from watching life to making a movie about his life (Inconvenience), using “his” (aka mostly Dante’s) life experiences as the basis for the movie. You can see a lot of Smith in Randal in terms of desire and motivation, almost to the point of his blind ambition taking control of his life and making a bunch of stupid decisions. It takes Dante’s death to bring Randal around and make the version of the movie that showed his friends what he should have presented the story as in the beginning.
• Marilyn Ghigliotti as Veronica Loughran
  A small cameo here as Dante’s first ex-girlfriend from the Clerks series, also as the girl who is known for sucking 37 dicks (…In a Row?). She has a family now and was brought into the Randal version of Inconvenience, only to end up hooking up with Dante for a one-night fling. It was nice to see her again at what we can hope is the finale of the film trilogy.
• Jennifer Schwalbach Smith as Emma Bunting
  Another Dante ex-girlfriend appears mostly as an extended cameo because she would be on set anyway due to this being a Kevin Smith film. She plays a complete bitch to Randal and Dante in small parts but ultimately loses out in the end so there will be no sequel.
• Rosario Dawson as Becky Scott
  The last of the girlfriends to be included in this saga of the life of Dante Hicks. Since the beginning of their relationship in Clerks 2, Becky has died from a car accident, the same goes for their unborn child, something that drives Dante to have personal issues throughout the shooting of Inconvenience. While she does show up in a ghost-like form and tries to get Dante to move on and live a full life, but ends up with him in the end anyway with Dante passing at the end of Clerks 3.
• Trevor Fehrman as Elias Grover
  One of the weirder characters in Clerks 3. Elias starts out just the same as he was in Clerks 2: An innocent Christian man-child. However, after an argument with Randal ends with Randal having his heart attack, Elias “turns” again his beliefs and begins to worship Satan (Though him worshiping Crom, as mentioned in a scene before the argument, would have worked even better) with his looks going from Emo to Goth to Showbiz Goth to Kiss-style Satanist along the way. While Elias and his friend Blockchain help out with the filming of Inconvenience, they don’t really do anything or serve a purpose.
• Jason Mewes as Jay
  Another weird change to a character. When Clerks was made, Jason Mews wasn’t an actor at all, just a kid who was doing what he was asked to do for his friend. Getting Jason to revisit this as Jay really shows that Mews has changed as both an actor and a human being as he really comes off as Jay did a really bad impression of his past self. Given that Mews has changed, and sobered up a lot from drug abuse since Clerks, it showed as someone who was ashamed to go back and had to act like he was in his darker days.
• Kevin Smith as Silent Bob
  Silent for the most part as usual till he becomes the DP of the film, wanting to do things like shooting in black and white, and backing up Randal’s “director’s vision” (aka his own commentary on directing). I’m surprised that Smith didn’t have Silent Bob take over completely as the Director just because he was the director of Clerks throughout the whole series, but since Randal was the stand-in for himself, it was smart enough to be the backup in the fictional movie shoot.
• Austin Zajur as Blockchain Coltrane
  A bit-part in just about every way… A new generation Silent Bob. As Elias’ best friend who doesn’t talk, Blockchain doesn’t do anything of note in the movie, standing back and shadowing Elias and his change from Christian to Satanist. You can tell this was a role pretty much made because this guy is Harley Smith’s boyfriend.
• Too many cameos to mention
  Fred Armisen, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., Melissa Benoist, Chris Wood, Anthony Michael Hall, Danny Trejo, and Impractical Jokers’ Brian Quinn, Sal Vulcano, James Murray, Joe Gatto, Kevin Smith’s mother Grace Smith all appear as actors auditioning for Inconvenience. Various customers from the original Clerks reprise their roles for the fictional film within a film. Other View Askew alumni cameos include John Willyung reprising his role as Cohee Lundin from Chasing Amy, as well as Scott Mosier and Ethan Suplee each reprising their role of Willam Black from both Clerks and Mallrats. Walt Flanagan, Bryan Johnson, Mike Zapcic, and Ming Chen from Comic Book Men (Also various Smodcasts) also make an appearance as a rival street hockey team at the beginning of the film. Harley Quinn Smith appears as a new Quick Stop employee at the end of the film.

Snoochie Boochies (What Worked)

I went into Clerks 3 thinking that this was going to be one of those self-absorbed “me, me, me” movies in which Smith casts himself through Dante as the ultimate underdog who has gone through a lot in his life but ultimately comes out as the hero in the end (Much like he tried to make himself out to be when his ideas for Masters of the Universe was in production and all those ideas got leaked to major backlash). What we got was a part apology, part realistic interpretation of where Smith’s career went after the events of Clerks 2 all the way through to where he was now. Showing that you can still learn from your mistakes (Even if those mistakes were Yoga Hosers and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot) and even accepting that some of your fans might not stick around for the ending of your major saga. Everything Smith has transcribed into Clerks 3 comes off as well-intentioned, well made, and overall well told. If Clerks 3 is indeed the end of the View Askewiverse, then it’s a fitting end.

She Sucked 37 Dicks… In a Row? (What didn’t work)

While Clerks 3 comes off as a fitting end to the film that started Kevin Smith’s career and characters, at times there are things in the film where you’d think Smith would have learned from past mistakes and grown as a filmmaker. When you look at Clerks 3 from a single film standpoint, it made me feel the same way I felt when I was watching The guild Seasons 3 & 4, that this was a movie designed to show off all Smith’s Hollywood connections in way too many cameo scenes (The Guild, a web-series by Felicia Day, was very independent in the first 2 seasons, then when Felicia started getting more Hollywood produced TV roles, she brought all her Hollywood friends into the series as a big showcase for no real reason). Though some of these things are done in the most obvious manner (Like Mark Hamil’s cameo in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), it’s weird seeing them done in such an obvious way in a film that was meant to be the serious part of the universe. Another thing that was hard to watch was some of the complaints wedged into Clerks 3, where there are multiple scenes dedicated to things like how “racist” some parts of the original Clerks were and how the film’s script would be seen by children, and while these are complaints Smith has copped over the years in his films, there was no need to address them in Clerks 3… Finally, there was the Becky situation, which really sucked to have her absent due to death in the film because she was one of the better things from Clerks 2, but instead, we got more Elias going through weird religious changes.

So that’s Kevin Smith’s Life huh? (Closing)

Clerks 3 comes off as a great look at the “third act” in Kevin Smith’s life, much like Clerks was the beginning of his career (or so he said later after making Clerks 2), and Clerks 2 was his “midlife crisis”. Telling a story that takes a pivotal moment in his own life (Smith’s 2018 heart attack) and using it to look back on the beginning of his career while looking at the times since that incident. While it does come off as a bit-self-centered at times, with cameo sequences that are simply in there just to show how many Hollywood friends he has made through the years, the overall writing and presentation remind us that when he really puts the time and effort into a movie Smith can really be a good film-maker. Now to wait and see how he ruins all his goodwill he’ll earn with Clerks 3 go right down the drain with the release of Masters of the Universe: Revelations Part 2 in a couple of months’ time.