Rating: R (pervasive sexual and crude content including abberant sexuality, strong language and s... Clerks II: ten years later
His movies still look crummy, as if they'd been shot with a pinhole camera. His humor still relies on sophomoric raunch and recurring characters who became tiresome the first time around.
And while he has stretched thematically — tackling Gen-X romance with "Chasing Amy" and Catholicism with "Dogma" — his films are more overblown skits than real stories. His most grown-up film, "Jersey Girl," was so reviled by his fan base (figures ... I liked it) that Smith hurriedly retreated to the tried and true.
Thus we have "Clerks II," the further adventures of New Jersey slackers Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson). Our boys are older and jowlier, but not much has changed. They've graduated from a convenience store to slinging burgers at Mooby's, a fast-food chain whose signature meal is a multi-storied sandwich called the Cow Tipper.
The goateed Dante, who has long regretted his dead-end life, is about to end it all. No, not suicide. He'll soon be marrying Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, the fimmaker's wife), a controlling woman who calls all the shots in their relationship and is taking her new hubby to Florida where Dante will work for her father.
The wise-guy Randal, still maintaining a state of prolonged adolescence, rides his pal unmercifully for selling out but is busily planning a bachelor party that will feature Kinky Kelly and Her Donkey Show.
Lingering outside the restaurant are a couple of other refugees from the first film: the obnoxiously hyperactive Jay (Jason Mewes) and his hulking partner Silent Bob (Smith). They peddle weed and play an obnoxiously loud boom box.
So far, so drab. O'Halloran and Anderson display nothing like range, delivering one-note performances (and not very convincing notes at that), and Mewes and Smith cling to the same shtick they've delivered in all of Smith's films.
The movie's strengths are to be found in a couple of new characters. Trevor Fehrman is a hoot as Elias, a dweeby Mooby's counterman who has no problem reconciling his family's born-again religion with his own mania for all things "Lord of the Rings." Naive and innocent, he's often the target of Randal's withering humor and sparks the film's best-written passage, a funny analysis of the battle for world domination between Tolkien geeks and "Star Wars" freaks.
And then there's Becky (Rosario Dawson), the Mooby's manager. She shares with Dante and Randal a general disdain for fast-food work; more importantly, she and Dante are clearly soul mates. And when we learn that they have shared a one-time moment of passion on the kitchen's preparation table ... well, it doesn't take doctorate in media studies to see that Dante is engaged to the wrong woman.
Smith introduces issues of aging and responsibility here, but they're undermined by the tastelessness of his humor. He's running on a creative treadmill, working up a sweat but getting nowhere.
This is cache, read story here