Film Reviews

Clerks 2

• Rating:
• Director: Kevin Smith
• Starring: Brian O'Halloran
• Details: US / 97mins (18s).

"You never go ass-to-mouth, Randal!" Everyone's favourite losers, Dante and Randal, are back to wax lyrical on.. everything. When the store they've been working in for ten years burns down, Dante (O'Halloran) and Randal (Anderson) are forced to seek a job in the fast food restaurant, Moobies. We pick up the story on Dante's last day before he takes off for Florida with his clingy fiancee Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach-Smith), and what follows is the usual Kevin Smith shtick: long, drawn-out conversations about appropriate sexual positions (the politics of the aforementioned ass-to-mouth), bestiality (or 'inter-species erotica' as those in the business call it), the dissection of Michael Bay's new Transformers movie, the long-running LOTR vs. Star Wars debate and the "taking back" of the Porch Monkey racial slur. Kevin Smith needed Clerks II more than you and I. After the slip up of Jersey Girl and the so-so Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, Smith needed a hit and he just might get it with this long awaited sequel. Going back to his roots and letting the characters have fun without getting bogged down with silly nonsense like plot, Smith and co. revel in the job at hand. This time around, though, Mews and Smith are sidelined to a long cameo, Anderson is more annoying than funny and Dante is too weedy to root for. Keeping a film moving by dialogue alone is a tall order; but for most of it, Smith keeps the ball rolling, while on occasion the dialogue feels too stagey or too written. You can almost see Smith sitting at the computer hammering out the lines. If you thought Clerks was the funniest movie ever made, you may be in danger of laughing your ass off with the sequel.

Review by Gavin Burke