Sequel to the 1994 cult comedy hit about store clerks standing around talking dirty. With Brian ... Two jackasses & a donk
Sequel to the 1994 cult comedy hit about store clerks standing around talking dirty. With Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Rosario Dawson. Writer-director Kevin Smith. (1:40) R: language, drug references. At City Cinemas 86th Street, Angelika, UA Battery Park Stadium 16.
The R rating given to the sequel to Kevin Smith's 1994 low-budget cult hit "Clerks" refers to "pervasive sexual and crude content, including aberrant sexuality."
The rest of the rating has it right. The humor is crude and pervasive. There are as many vulgar sexual references here as there were joints smoked in the Cheech and Chong movies, which "Clerks" resembles in its appeal to delayed adolescents.
In fact, Cheech and Chong are sort of repeated by the returning main characters in "Clerks II," Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) and Dante Hicks (Brian O'Halloran). They're not dopers, but they are dopes - now thirtysomething losers stalled in the fast-food lane.
After more than a decade manning the New Jersey Quick Stop convenience and video store where we met them in '94, Randal and Dante are now slinging burgers at Mooby's, a McDonald's-style restaurant where there is so little business they can goof off all day.
There's actually something of a plot here. Dante is engaged and about to move to Florida when he realizes he may actually be in love with his boss, super-hot Becky (Rosario Dawson), whom he'd gotten pregnant during a drunken encounter on Mooby's mayo-slathered food-prep table.
But it's just a bit of a plot, nothing to detract from the real business of standing around talking dirty. Mostly, it's the insistently juvenile and unfunny Randal doing the talking, spewing out pornographic images and verbally assaulting Elias (Trevor Fehrman), their virginal co-worker.
Some of the banter is fun, like Randal's debate with Elias over the relative merits of "Star Wars" vs. "The Lord of the Rings." But most is just trash-talk as shoptalk.
Though "Clerks II" is in color, the acting is just as amateurish and the directing just as awkward as the black-and-white original. Dawson gives the only competent performance, and only Becky and the abused donkey are sympathetic characters.
Smith's fans will be happy to know that Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are back, just out of rehab but still dealing drugs with their backs against the wall. Ben Affleck and Jason Lee, who've been in several of Smith's early films, show up in cameos as Mooby's customers.
To round out this Smith hoedown, the director's wife, Jennifer Schwalbach, plays Dante's ditsy fiancée, and their 7-year-old daughter Harley appears as a girl staring through a car window.
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