Thursday, March 19, 2009

Clerks II

Day 4 - 1/4/09 - Movie #4

BEFORE: The final piece of the Kevin Smith "Askewniverse", the only one I haven't seen. Huge fan of "Jay & Silent Bob Strikes Back", for all the Star Wars references. But part of what made "Clerks" successful was the indie, made-on-a-shoestring attitude. Can a big-budget, color sequel capture the same magic?

THE PLOT: A calamity at Dante and Randall's shops sends them looking for new horizons - but they ultimately settle at Mooby's, a fictional Disney-McDonald's-style fast-food empire.

AFTER: OK, so it was no "Jay & Silent Bob", but it had some charm. Like "Juno", it had the lingo down, and the romantic developments were incredibly obvious, but at least it had more story structure than "Clerks" did. It's so hard for Kevin Smith to rise above, isn't it? Like Dante, he seems to have found his skill level, and that's that. Funny and offensive, but not outrageously so on either point.

RATING: 6 out of 10 milk jugs.

1 comment:

  1. It's fun to imagine that this movie is taking place in the "Omega Man" universe, and these characters are the only living beings left on the planet. It's sort of eerie how it's a fast-food restaurant with no customers, there's no ambient noise, no music on the soundtrack...creeped me out after a while.

    It would have been a better film if it'd started and ended later. I'm more interested in seeing how Randal and Dante deal with responsibility than their slow realization that they should have started committing to some personal goals at least a decade ago.

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