One Sleaze Burger. Extra Cheesy, Please! Clerks II (2006) Film Review

Clerks II is large clump of pure crap. But even a dumpster fire has the occasional, baffling spark, and this film has exactly three.

The absolute peak of the entire runtime? Watching Lord of the Rings nerds viciously roast Star Wars nerds, completely and blissfully unaware of the delicious irony of their own glass house let alone the triple irony when you see how this movie franchise is now a nerd cult itself. It’s a moment of comedic genius I desperately wish I could witness in the wild. Toss in the genuinely funny dialogue from the black customer couple and the awkward, cringey hilarity of watching characters absolutely freak out over words they’ve arbitrarily decided are racist, and you’ve got about ten minutes of solid gold.

Unfortunately, those ten minutes are buried in the rest of the movie.

This whole affair feels less like a necessary sequel and more like Kevin Smith wanted to use a few well-thought-out ideas but also needed to win a favor. It comes off as a strained attempt to be the “loyal friend” by handing Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson their own movie, all while pretending this is some grand universe that desperately needed its fandom wiki book thickened.

Newsflash: It’s not. The film’s biggest failure is its attempt to be two completely incompatible things at once: it’s a bafflingly cheesy, sentimental romance stapled awkwardly to a sleazy, juvenile smut-fest.

The whole thing just can’t bear the strain. No matter how big Smith insists his heart is (or how many crocodile tears he manages to squirt onto the script), the entire production collapses under its own theatrics. Every attempt at a “dramatic” moment nose-dives straight into melodrama. Every “touching” scene just turns… yukh.

And then there’s the message. Smith clearly wants to tell us to “be yourself,” “don’t let others influence your decisions,” and “live your own life.” A ludicrous atheist preaching! only if he’d bothered to show us with allegory or, you know, filmmaking, it would be passable (maybe). Instead, he just has the characters stop the movie to tell us the moral, as if we’re all toddlers in sensitivity training who are just learning about life. It’s the cinematic lecture, and we weren’t even supposed to be here today.

Rating: 2.86/10

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