Randal (Jeff Anderson) receives a wake-up call when he suffers a heart attack on the job at the Quik Stop convenience store. Approaching fifty and surviving a near-death experience, he decides to finally do something with his life. He makes a vow to stop watching movies and start making them, starting with the story of his life, set at the Quik Stop. Along for the ride is his best friend Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and everyone’s favorite stoners, Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith).
Of course, Kevin Smith suffered the same kind of heart attack in real life (dubbed “The Widowmaker”), which was the impetus for the movie. Having Randal and Dante filming scenes from the first Clerks in the convenience store might seem like a lazy meta joke, but I think this was kind of a “What If” story for Smith, had he never found early success. He might’ve still been making movies at the Quik Stop even if his career didn’t catch on. Randal and Dante have always been his mouthpieces for pop culture musings and dick jokes in the past. Now, the older and wiser (kinda) Smith is using them to speak from the heart (no pun intended), which is actually kind of touching.
Smith has told many anecdotes of the making of Clerks over the years in interviews, commentaries, and one man shows, so seeing a thinly fictionalized version of them seems at first like a weak premise for a sequel. However, Smith’s love of making movies shows through in scene after scene, and it’s fun seeing many of the original’s iconic scenes being remade. (It would make a good double feature with Be Kind Rewind.) I will say that the new dick jokes, Star Wars humor, and typical Clerks hijinks isn’t quite as laugh out loud funny (or as flagrantly foul) as some of the previous installments in the “View Askewniverse”. However, the “audition” scene offers up some big laughs as it features a who’s who of celebrity cameos.
Like most of Smith’s latter-day films, Clerks 3 works, largely because of the enormous goodwill the characters have built up over the past four decades. Even when he goes a little heavy on the maudlin mushy stuff near the end, it works better than it probably should because we’ve grown to love these characters so much over the years. While it may not live up to the heights of the first two films, it is nevertheless a fitting finale (possibly) to the trilogy.
I personally despised how this film totally fridged Rosario Dawson's character, it felt totally unnecessary to me and left a bad taste in my mouth that the film never recovered from, the laughs felt half-hearted at best and the overly sentimental ending felt really unearned and inspired no emotions from me at all other then annoyance at how forced it was, honestly i wish this film had never been made. As far as i'm concerned this story ends with Clerks 2. i get why Smith wanted to tell this story but I don't know why he thought Randall having a heart attack wasn't enough and he had to kill off his wife too, that just felt dumb and contrived and far too mean-spirited and I found it hard to laugh at anything in the film even at scenes that were actually funny.
ReplyDelete