ReView Askew: Clerks III (2022)

In February of 2018, immediately after performing at a live event in Glendale, CA, Kevin Smith started to feel very unwell very quickly. It turns out he was suffering a massive heart attack, and was immediately shuttled to a hospital to clear a blockage from one of his arteries. He tweeted about it as soon as he could from his hospital bed (of course), learning that his medical issue was referred to as “the widow-maker” in how severe it is, and how slim one’s chances of recovery are. Smith had performed one of a scheduled three shows that night, and if he had carried on with the other two as planned and not received medical attention, he almost certainly would have died. It’s certainly an incredibly sobering event to go through, one that Smith really took to heart (so to speak…), re-evaluating his entire life up to that point, and how he would carry on after being given a second chance. He had already written a potential script for a third Clerks, but he ended up scrapping it in favor of a version more reflective of what had just happened to him and his new outlook on life, on looking back and looking forward. For better or worse, Clerks III became one of his most personal films, where the line between Kevin Smith and the characters he’s writing is blurred the furthest its ever gotten.

The other major origin for this film is “Clerks: Sell Out,” the unproduced Clerks: The Animated Series feature film, which would have featured Dante and Randal making a movie at the Quick Stop. I don’t know Smith ever started writing a script for it, but I can only imagine it would have contained a lot of the same behind-the-scenes jokes, cameos and callbacks that we also see in Clerks III, maybe in a more absurdist fashion, since it would’ve been based on the cartoon. If it had actually come out in the 2000s, a movie about the making of Clerks would have been kind of cute, almost like a companion piece to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, a double feature love letter by Kevin Smith to his original characters and the world he created over his first five films. But now in 2022, Smith has basically strip-mined every last bit of his filmography, his podcasts, even his own personal life to use as source material and joke fodder. Dante and Randal’s seemingly final outing becomes a celebration of Clerks, done by a filmmaker who literally has not stopped talking about Clerks since he made it almost thirty years ago. It’s a movie that feels both overbearingly somber and absolutely frivolous, trying so hard to be poignant and give its characters a final dramatic arc, but refuses to let them have any real growth since their entire existences are locked down to just the previous two movies. While Clerks II ended on a hopeful, though uncertain ambiguous note, Clerks III ends this epic trilogy with a blunt hammer swing to the face.

In a long opening set to the entirety of My Chemical Romance’s “Black Parade,” we see life has continued as normal in Jersey, with a much older Dante and Randal still owning and running the Quick Stop. We get hit hard by one major change, however: an obituary for Becky, the woman Dante married by the end of Clerks II, who died very shortly after the events of that film. It’s almost like Kevin Smith was hedging his bets as to how many days he could get Rosario Dawson on set, since her career is certainly much bigger now than it was in 2006. It casts a pretty dark cloud over the rest of the movie, but her absence means we can have our classic Clerks opening of Dante setting up the Quick Stop in the morning and later playing hockey on the roof. Jay and Silent Bob are here too, of course, now legitimate business owners of a weed depository, which replaced the RST Video (although they feel more comfortable doing business out in front of the store “covertly” like the good old days, in a pretty cute gag.) Jason Mewes gets in a couple chuckle-worthy lines (“Shut the fuck up! It’s night time!”), but Jay’s pretty much a dumb cartoon character here, not realizing he owns his own store and forgetting Dante’s name. I already grew tired of them after revisiting Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, and after this, I really don’t want to see those two ever again. Kevin Smith milked those boys far beyond what they were worth, just let them out to pasture already.

Also present is Elias from Clerks II, now in his 30s, working at the Quick Stop and hawking Christian NFTs, as well as kites with Buddy Christ on them, because reference. He and Randal banter early on in the movie, but as we just saw in Reboot, a lot of the spark of Smith’s signature writing is kind of gone. There’s some choice lines sprinkled throughout, but a lot of it feels like imitations of what these characters might say rather than anything authentic. Early in the movie, Elias has a crisis of faith and pledges loyalty to Satan, later showing up dressed in all black with heavy eyeliner and a pentagon necklace. From that point, his character basically devolves into putting him in increasingly sillier and more elaborate outfits, at one point looking like Alice Cooper with full face paint, a top hat and gothic finger claw jewelry. It wasn’t funny the first time he reappears as a Satanist, and it gets more and more eye-rolling as this running “gag” continues. He’s also got his own little buddy, “Blockchain Coltrane,” played by Austin Zajur (Kevin Smith’s daughter’s boyfriend), who doesn’t speak and just pantomimes for no real reason. Randal calls him Elias’s Silent Bob, except I don’t really know why he is. In Reboot, Milly having her own Silent Bob made sense since she’s Jay’s daughter, and it also fit the motif of the rebooted girl gang of having her best friend be a black deaf girl. Here, there’s no reason why this character shouldn’t speak, other than he’s just like another Silent Bob. Funny?

After we settle back into the Clerks world, Randal has his heart attack, and he is quickly whisked away to a hospital where he’s cared for by Dr. Landeheim (named after the real doctor who saved Kevin Smith’s life), played by Amy Sedaris. She shows up dressed as a witch, explaining she came to work from a costume party (a possible Clerks: TAS reference? In the third episode, we see the Mayor and police chief of Leonardo both arriving to press conferences in McDonaldland character costumes.) Sedaris does her best, but she’s not given much to work with. She tries to warm herself up to Randal by relating to his love of superheroes, but clearly doesn’t know a thing about them (she quotes Spider-Man’s “with great power…” line in a Batman voice.) She also operates on Randal while he’s still conscious, which I can’t imagine was the same as what Kevin Smith went through, but hey, I guess it’s possible. Also the nurse pictured above doesn’t speak, choosing to gesture to Sedaris instead (nurses famously do some of their best work non-verbally) So is she her Silent Bob too? Why is Kevin Smith doing this? We also get a Justin Long cameo playing an orderly, who is doing the strangest accent, almost like a midwestern Walter Matthau. It was really bothering me for his entire scene; not nearly to the sickening degree as Johnny Depp in Tusk, but it’s rare when you have a strong negative visceral reaction to an actor’s performance.

In recovery, Dante and Randal have a nice moment, where Randal starts to break about his near-death experience (“I always thought… hoped… that my life was building towards something. Turns out it was just the hospital.”) This is kind of neat to watch unfold; Randal has always been the easy-going jokester to Dante’s worrywart, so seeing him actually express regret for his life not-well lived is kind of interesting. It’s reminiscent of the moments when Randal got “real” in Clerks II, and even after all this time, it’s some of the most believable stuff in the movie. As usual, Jeff Anderson and Brian O’Halloran slip back into these roles effortlessly, and the few times they’re given some really emotionally charged material to dig into, they pull it off almost as good as ever. The movie succeeds in certain moments due in large part to the commitment of the actors, and even when we get to the end, the emotion doesn’t fall completely flat thanks to them. I’m sure a good amount of this is purely from the goodwill I have towards these characters: it definitely assisted in my enjoyment of Clerks II, and by the end, it basically held me back from flat out hating this movie. Anyway, Randal comes to a revelation: after a lifetime of talking about (and goofing on) movies, he’s going to make his very own. You can see the faint soul of Kevin Smith inside Randal, someone who wants to see his own life, his words, his experiences represented in a movie like he’s never seen put out there before. This idea isn’t bad, but the meta, overly nostalgic nature of what follows tips it from feeling genuine to being obnoxiously self-congratulating.

So what’s Randal’s movie going to be about? His life working for almost thirty years at the Quick Stop, of course. He spitballs different things that have happened to he and Dante over the years as potential scenes, which of course were all things that happened in Clerks. We’re talking over twenty-five years these guys have worked at the same goddamn store and the only memories they have happened one single shift they worked in 1994. It’s like the joke in the second episode of Clerks: TAS where they keep recalling events from the same day, but played straight. My wife suggested that this might retroactively re-frame the original Clerks as Randal’s movie, where he cobbled together different moments throughout their years into one story, which I guess is a possible reading, but to me, it just reinforces how little Dante and Randal have developed. Like Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, these characters have been held in cryostasis. Outside of the two days featured in the first two Clerks, Dante and Randal may as well never have even existed. It’s something they were able to get away with in the time jump into Clerks II, but it reads as bizarre that seemingly nothing of note at all has happened in the sixteen years that followed. To secure funding for the movie, Dante contacts Emma, his ex-fiancee, a woman he hasn’t spoken to in fifteen years. Do these characters not know anybody? Like the movie or not, but Clerks II expanded the cast with new characters for Dante and Randal to react to. In Clerks III, everything all leads back to the original movies, and how much you as an audience will go apeshit over seeing Willem Black again, or seeing Chewlie’s Gum branding all over the Quick Stop.

There’s also a large degree of incongruity involved with the idea of making Clerks in 2022 versus 1993. Randal says he’ll need $27,575 to make his movie (the reported production cost for Clerks), but why would he need that much? Back in the 90s, I’m sure a lot of that money went into buying actual film stock and renting time in an edit bay to physically put the film together. But now everything is digital, so none of those expenses really apply. Hell, Randal could have shot the movie on an iPhone, Tangerine style. There’s also no material mined out of shooting a film with a 1993 script in modern-day, an ode to Generation X playing to a modern audience. It actually would have been a great role for Milly, Jay’s daughter, to fill, commenting on different aspects of the script that don’t make sense to her, analyzing Clerks through a different generational lens. But the movie isn’t really about criticizing Clerks, it’s all about holding it in reverence, letting the scenes play out as they were. The only real moment of modern-day commentary is when someone points out how there’s no diversity in Randal’s movie, and calls out the repeated reference of Caitlin Bree’s fiancé as an “Asian” design major. I guess those things are true, but these weren’t exactly burning concerns that needed to be addressed about the original Clerks. Plus later in the movie there’s a character who’s basically an outraged black woman stereotype, so I don’t know how well this self-critique holds water.

A big chunk of the back half of the movie is Randal filming his movie, where we see a lot of the behind-the-scenes decisions going into making it. This of course includes lots of direct references to the production of Clerks: explaining the closed shutters because of gum in the locks, Jason Mewes thinking the “Jay” character is nothing like him, the original ending of Dante getting shot and killed, even more obscure stuff like Randal having way too much make-up on in the scene where he tells Veronica about Dante and Caitlin (which was the very first scene they shot for Clerks, where the amateur make-up artist applied way too much onto Jeff Anderson’s face). But here’s the thing, though… who cares? I guess, like always, it’s for the Kevin Smith faithful to chuckle at, understanding the parallels between this and the making of Clerks, but these are stories Smith has been telling in his Q&As for over twenty years now. We’ve heard him talk about shooting Clerks over and over and over again, so what’s the appeal in seeing it again, only this time in movie form? It ends up coming off as Family Guy-style reference humor, which most of Smith’s output from Yoga Hosers on basically has been. It all feels so incredibly masturbatory. I don’t think Kevin Smith has an air of self-importance about him, but he clearly has an incredible reverence towards Clerks, and knows his fan base does as well, so this is an easy way to placate both parties. Before he decides everyone should just play themselves, Randal holds auditions (at the same playhouse that Kevin Smith held tryouts for Clerks), but none of the would-be actors are age appropriate to the original Clerks, it’s just a cameo fest, ranging from the expected (Ben Affleck, Ralph Garman, Kevin Smith’s mother) to the not-so expected (Danny Trejo, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze, Jr.?) They’re just there to read the most famous Clerks lines in outrageous ways, because you love Clerks and it’s funny to hear lines you remember.

I’ve previously talked about legacy sequels, and how I feel kind of sad seeing older actors return to their classic roles to do the ol’ song and dance once more for our nostalgic amusement. Clerks III does that in spades. Marilyn Ghigliotti returns as Veronica, and all the Quick Stop and RST Video customers look like they’re all played by the original “actors” (or rather, friends of Smith and the crew they could get to come over one night to shoot a scene for free.) So when we see Dante pulling the Pringles can off a guy’s hand, the lady storming out of RST after Randal passively insults her, the Chewlie’s gum representative hawking his wares at the counter… everyone just looks so old. So, so old. To me, it’s not interesting seeing these scenes recreated like this, it just bums me out seeing them like this. On Future Day 2015, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel as Marty and Doc, having finally arrived in “the future.” I’m a humongous Back to the Future fan, and yeah, it’s great to see them together again, but even with source material I’m deeply connected with, it still had an undercurrent of sadness seeing how old and tired they looked. Like, if Kevin Smith had made a whole bunch of original movies post Clerks II, returning to do Clerks III might have felt like a novelty, but having this directly follow Jay and Silent Bob Reboot just feels a continuation of the ultimate regression, like he literally can’t think of anything to do other than just remake his first movie.

As Elias points out when Randal pitches the idea of his movie to him, this is definitely very meta. I remember loving meta stories when I was younger, premises where the fourth wall gets acknowledged, or even completely busted through. Authors being confronted by their creations, characters coming to terms with their realities as fictional beings, it felt kind of cool to break all the rules of storytelling and make the stories themselves the focal point.
But now, modern reboots especially love to be meta, being self-referential as an excuse to hand wave any joke about how unnecessary their very existence as an exhumed IP corpse masquerading as a brand new product is. Back in 2012, it felt kind of cute in the 21 Jump Street movie when Nick Offerman’s character dumps on the concept of reboots in an actual reboot, but a whole decade later, this shit’s gotten old. Even reboots I consider smartly made (like The Matrix Resurrections), I feel like I more appreciate what they’re trying to say more than I actually enjoy them as movies. Ultimately, if the schtick for your sequel/remake/reboot is that you’re doing all the same shit again, you need to have an actually interesting and clever reason for it, something that is not present here. Randal is just making Clerks, a film about people in the twenties, starring actors who are pushing fifty, with seemingly no changes addressing this visual dissonance. It’s really hard to get any concept of what Randal’s “Inconvenience” movie is about, since all we see are disconnected scenes from the first Clerks, which even if you accept that all of those events didn’t actually happen on the same day in Dante and Randal’s lives, they all still had to happen within the first ten years of their almost thirty year stint working at the Quick Stop. The real Clerks is compelling and relatable since it’s about the listlessness of your twenties, feeling hopeless and not knowing what to do with your life. A movie about two guys who’ve felt stuck for decades, with the real 50-year-old men playing themselves as 22-year-olds, is its own kind of fascinating, but the reality of Randal’s movie is never examined whatsoever. To do so would probably have made the movie a lot sadder, and it’s clear the big appeal of Clerks III is to remind you of how much you love Clerks, and those are the absolute worst kind of reboots to me.

By the end of the movie, when we’re actually showed clips of the original Clerks, so you can see the comparisons to the re-created scenes shot in this movie, it becomes even clearer how much Clerks III kind of looks like crap. Kevin Smith would always be the first to criticize himself as a director, but in his earlier movies, you could see he was definitely trying, experimenting with different ways to frame shots, how to communicate things visually, and so forth. Even an atom bomb disaster like Tusk was experimental with Smith trying to emulate a completely different genre. But with Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and now this, it really just feels like he’s on autopilot. 90% of the movie is flatly staged, shot-reverse-shot of actors talking back and forth to each other, with the editing feeling particularly awkward as some shots will either hang on too long or come up too soon, so there’s just these little dead spaces that feel weird and pointless. The clearly amateur production of Clerks is part of its charm, but Smith and his crew still found new ways to shoot in the Quick Stop outside of just straight ahead at the counter. We’d follow Randal to the back of the store to get a drink, shoot from behind an aisle, go underneath the counter, lots of simple ways to keep things interesting. Even in Clerks II, he was still trying new things, like the whole dance sequence, as well as washing out the color of the movie to reflect the emotional turmoil of the characters. But in Smith’s last few movies, everything is done so straight-ahead and dull. Characters will barely cross over the imaginary camera line to physically interact with whoever they’re talking to. When Veronica storms into the store, and then later back to her car, Dante doesn’t even share a frame with her during their reunion. I don’t know if Smith considers this to just be economical film making or something, but it’s pretty incredible how much he’s fallen back as a visual director, considering he wasn’t really at any high peaks to begin with.

Running alongside the filming of Randal’s movie is Dante still dealing with the tragic loss of his wife. Rosario Dawson appears in spirit (or as a Force ghost, if you will), urging Dante that he needs to start a new chapter of his life and feel okay about moving on. Dante the widower, and learning about the horrible tragedy that his wife and unborn daughter were killed by a drunk driver, really make this movie slam on the brakes. They try to soften things a little bit, with Dawson being infectiously charming as always, but the long conversation between her and Dante about how many famous people she’s fucked in Heaven… again, it feels like someone mimicking something Kevin Smith would write. Then Dante starts to bawl and we veer into pure melodrama territory. I can’t imagine how traumatic it must be to lose your pregnant spouse, but it seems almost exaggeratedly depressing that Dante is so absolutely paralyzed with grief sixteen years later that he feels life hasn’t been worth living without her. I was trying to research exactly when Dante and Randal got hired at Mooby’s, and I was finally able to narrow it down. In “Where’s the Beef?,” a Clerks comic Kevin Smith wrote taking place immediately after the Quick Stop burned down, we find out it happened in 2005, and we see Dante and Randal filling out Mooby’s applications that same day, meaning Dante only knew Becky for less than a year before they finally got together, and she died seven or so months after that. The way Dante is acting, and the incredible length of his mourning, would be believable if this was a woman he’s known almost his whole life, and even that would feel like a bit of a stretch.

Seeing Dante being borderline suicidal (by his own admission) is so incredibly disheartening to see. Not in the sense that I don’t want to see these characters miserable, but just knowing how he’s felt this depressed practically since the credits rolled on Clerks II all the way up until now is a lot. Dante laments that his happy ending from the last movie was snatched away from him, but part of that ending was his reconciliation with Randal and them buying the Quick Stop. That felt like an integral part of his satisfactory conclusion, the new life he actually chose for himself, that it makes his portrayal in this movie all the more sadder. I know Randal is kind of a piece of shit, but I can’t imagine him not being there for his buddy when his wife and unborn child are tragically killed. It’s a quick moment, but when Randal is waxing on about his wasted life after his heart attack, and all the things he’d never done, he sadly says to Dante, “I never fell in love like you,” at least implying that underneath it all, he cared about Dante actually finding true love. Instead, it feels like Dante has been suffering in silence for all these long years. Filling in some of the gaps of what’s gone on in the last sixteen years might help make all of this feel more believable, or at least explained in some fashion, but once again, they’re not moments from the original two Clerks, so they’re not in this movie.

It wouldn’t be a Clerks movie without Dante getting pissed off at Randal, and his latest blowup is certainly a doozy. Firstly, after his heart attack, Randal acts like a prick to Dante for no reason, which typically is par for the course with him, but it feels even more unmotivated than usual. He openly insults Dante’s character in the script and in a Star Wars analogy, says he’s an utterly insignificant character for no real reason. I get he always busts Dante’s balls, but what’s all this about? In Clerks, Randal is a twenty-something little shit, so his constant ribbing of Dante was almost charming, given he was just a shiftless kid fucking around. In Clerks II, Randal is especially irritable and volatile to Dante and Elias throughout the film, but we learn by the end that it was a mask covering his inner despair over his best friend leaving him forever. But now, in Clerks III, there’s not much of an excuse for the nearly 50-year-old Randal to still be acting this way. You’ve been hanging out almost exclusively with this guy for decades now, someone you practically begged not to leave you, how can you say with a straight face that he wouldn’t have a meaningful role in the story of your life? It’s all just manufactured to set up the final emotional climax, so it’s a lot more calculated than anything natural.

Unable to bring himself to step foot in the Mooby’s he and Randal used to work at to shoot the donkey show scene from Clerks II, Dante gets piss drunk to cope, which eventually leads to him blowing up at Randal (“My whole life, you’ve been running your mouth a million miles an hour and saying absolutely nothing! I gotta listen to you talk shit about everybody and everything you think, as if the world’s waiting for you to weigh in! Nobody fucking cares!”) O’Halloran’s pretty good here. He was starting to fall down in the sad dramatic acting a bit, especially playing against a much more trained actor like Rosario Dawson, but he definitely knows his way around an entire page of Kevin Smith dialogue. He passionately talks about how in being stuck making Randal’s movie about their lives, he was dying inside, since he never wanted to revisit that life ever again. Again, it’s really hard to decipher, since we’ve exclusively seen him shooting scenes from the original Clerks, long before he met Becky, but it really feels like Dante is speaking in the maximum here. To him, his entire life was absolute misery, and he can barely get himself to get out of bed in the morning to live yet another day of agony. It’s incredibly fucked up, and is an enormous fucking emotional cliff for the movie to have to climb back down from for anything close to a satisfying ending (spoiler: it doesn’t.) Then the very end of Dante’s speech is cut off by having his own heart attack. What a copycat.

Randal arrives at the hospital, laptop in tow, and in what’s meant to be the touching emotional climax, he shows Dante his finished movie, revealing Dante is actually the protagonist (“This is the way I see you. You’re the main character of my Star Wars. You’ve always been my hero, Dante.”) But, wasn’t he always the main character? Up to this point, I never understood why, if Randal wanted to tell the story of his life, he was making Clerks, which is primarily about Dante. Veronica is featured in the movie, we see more footage of Dante being filmed than Randal… how has he not always been the main character? From everything we see of them shooting the movie, he clearly is. Maybe there were a lot of Randal-centric scenes we never saw, probably because they weren’t from either Clerks movie, so why bother showing them? I guess we’re meant to believe Randal re-edited the movie to make Dante the protagonist? But how could he even do that? It’s honestly a fatal flaw of the movie, and it certainly makes this moment, what would end up being Dante and Randal’s last moments together (spoilers) feel less emotionally impactful. I still found myself welling up a little bit anyway, but I’m an incredibly easy mark when it comes to this stuff. A comatose Dante finds himself in an empty theater watching footage of the first two Clerks as Randal’s movie, absolutely captivated by the final film. Considering Dante had just talked about how much he hated his fucking life, I don’t really know why he’s looking back in reverence at moments like the guy checking for the perfect carton of eggs or bitchy customers at RST Video. If it was exclusively about he and Randal’s lifelong friendship, that would be one thing, but I guess there’s not enough footage of that to cover. Proud of his best friend’s work, Dante leaves the theater with Becky, off to clock in at that great big convenience store in the sky.

So yeah, Dante’s fucking dead, you guys. That’s how Clerks III ends. Randal gives a eulogy, which for some reason includes a dig at Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (complete with a reaction shot of Silent Bob being in agreement. Very topical, Kevin!), and he concludes his final farewell to his fallen friend with, what else, “You weren’t even supposed to be here today.” In another reality, that might have been a tragically ironic callback, if that quote hadn’t been repeated by Smith dozens of times over his different movies, shows, comics, live events, and so forth. Hell, we heard it repeated dozens of times in this movie alone by all the auditioning actors, and it’s even Dante’s final spoken line before he has his heart attack. We also get two different Quick Stop sign jokes in the movie (“I Assure You, He’s Alive” after Randal’s recovery, and “I Assure You, We’re in Mourning” after Dante’s death.) And how appropriate for the death of Kevin Smith’s inaugural protagonist to be symbolized by two jokes Smith has repeated ad nauseam for his entire career. This attempt at an emotional conclusion only further emphasizes how little Smith can think to do other than just recycle the same fucking jokes. After his heart attack, Randal mused about how limited his view of the world was, how little he really accomplished, and how he wasted so much of his life watching the same movies over and over. After his own heart attack, Kevin Smith made Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III, two movies that are regurgitating the same material from his previous filmography over and over.

Where does Kevin Smith go from here? I honestly haven’t got a clue. He directed a new horror movie right before this one, KillRoy Was Here, that might get a wider release at some point. It was originally meant to be the very first movie to be sold as an NFT, but it recently was screened at the New Jersey theater Kevin Smith owns, so I don’t know if that ever really happened (he is still in bed with Legendao, the NFT platform who produced KillRoy, which I guess explains the stupid dumb epilogue of Clerks III where Elias’s crypto bullshit is the deus ex machina that saves Randal from being in debt for his movie.) Maybe he really likes making these dumb goofy horror movies, so he’ll continue down that road. But in terms of doing a new film that has any sort of emotional resonance or something unique about him he wants to say, it feels like he’s pretty much tapped. Smith used his original Clerks characters to work through his personal problems and revelations about new stages in his life, to varying entertaining results, but now, with he and the main cast entering their 50s and with Dante dead, it feels like there’s no way to go back there now. He’d be the first to admit this, but Kevin Smith is a real lucky schmuck for the success of Clerks, and despite his several attempts to try and make different kinds of movies, he always gravitated back to that film, in a way that I’m sure felt nostalgically comforting, in a similar way that his hardcore fans have latched onto this characters and not let go after almost thirty years. There’s a sweet innocence to that that I can admire Smith for, but it absolutely stunted him as a creator. Reboot and Clerks III, while being pure at heart, are pretty terrible movies, and represent the worst impulses of Smith patronizing to his audience. Could he ever surprise us with a new, truly original film in the future? It suppose it’s possible. But for now, I am more than ready to bid the world of Kevin Smith adieu. Despite this wet fart of a finale, I still retained my fondness for the original two Clerks, plus the cartoon, as well as Dogma, his most ambitious film, but the rest kind of exist on a sliding scale of naively bad to absolute dogshit. But no hard feelings, Kevin. You still seem really chill in all your appearances, but sometimes, it’s hard to love yah, big guy.

FINAL VIEW ASKEWNIVERSE POWER RANKINGS:
1. Clerks
2. Clerks II
3. Clerks: The Animated Series
4. Dogma
5. Chasing Amy
6. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
7. Clerks III
8. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot
9. Mallrats