Clerks II

Ten years on and much Hollywood success later, Kevin “Silent Bob” Smith returns to bookend the original black & white indie comedy that launched him. Where are Dante and Randal now? Has Dante outgrown his indecisiveness or Randal his adolescent preoccupations? And did they ever see that fabled donkey show?

No, no and no, of course, not in a Kevin Smith movie. The opening of Clerks II is Dante (Brian O’Halloran) raising the metal grating one morning at the Quick Stop only to find the interior consumed in fire; Randal (Jeff Anderson), with typical thoughtlessness, had left the empty coffeepot on the previous evening. Fate finally put an end to their internment and not ambition or even pride (the boys are 33 years old, for crying out loud) but what do they do with the opportunity? Take jobs behind the counter at the local Mooby’s fast food joint.

Dante has found love, sort of, in the form of their hot high school classmate Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, married in real life to writer/director Smith) and, a year after the fire, the two are headed to Florida in 24 hours where they’ll move in with her wealthy parents for a few months until the wedding. Emma seems to have realized that the hunky guys she’s been dating before Dante have egos to match her own but Dante’s low self-esteem makes him her’s to control.

Randal is as foul-mouthed and misinformed as ever. One running joke is over the made-up anti-black slur porch monkey, that he never understood his grandmother was a racist and all the nasty names she taught him were offensive epithets. Another is his confusion of Anne Frank and Helen Keller, though not to quite the same effect. He isn’t happy with Dante’s plans. There’s a new younger character, sort of Randal’s opposite (virgin who’d rather wash his mouth out with soap than curse), played by Trevor Ferhman called Elias; the kid is the butt of many, many of Randal’s jokes.

Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are here too, just returned from six months in rehab, hanging out back dealing drugs and dancing their weird dances. Rosario Dawson is Becky, the lovely younger woman who really loves Dante, though she won’t admit it and he doesn’t realize it. Jason Lee and Ben Affleck make their customary cameos though Lee has the better of it, playing a high school classmate of our boys who recently struck it rich after his internet startup was acquired for millions.

The best scene in C2, for me is when Becky tries to teach Dante how to dance for his wedding up on the Mooby’s roof (other than the open and close and a couple of brief scenes, the entire film takes place in or around the fast food joint). The song is the Jackson 5 classic ABC, played at blast volume by Jay down below, and after we see the blinders fall from Dante’s eyes at the girls beauty and charm Smith gives a terrific homage to the Ray Charles music store scene in Blues Brothers. First a series of quick cuts to the other leads toe-tapping or headshaking wherever they are and then a full blown coordinated dance scene out in the parking lot.

Overall funnier than I thought it would be, if (and this is a big if) you can get past the continuous stream of obscenities and general teenage level nastiness. And that donkey scene? Close but not quite what you’ll be expecting.

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