Clerks II (2006)

If you're a fan of Clerks, the convenience-store slacker comedy made for $27,000 that, in 1994, established Kevin Smith as the who-needs-a-budget-when-you've-got-attitude? auteur of his generation, then you'll probably want to see Clerks II. Yet it's precisely devotees of the Smith universe (porn jokes, cruddy camera angles, surprise flights of grunge eloquence, more porn jokes) who have a right to be wary of a Clerks sequel. Can Smith, after finding fame and fortune beyond the mini-mall parking lots of New Jersey, now successfully revive the talky, dead-zone limbo of postadolescent wage slaves whose lives are going nowhere? Can he recapture the store-as-movie-set authenticity of the original film? How about its innocently sacrilegious horndog wit?

The answer, of course, is that Kevin Smith can recapture all of this — or, at least, enough of it to make Clerks II an agreeable mischievous romp instead of a rip-off — because he never truly abandoned it in the first place. Clerks II, unlike Clerks, has been shot in color and given the semblance of a plot — will Dante Hicks grow up into a responsible citizen? — but really, the movie, like Clerks, is a low-budget excuse for talk: dirty talk, dorky talk, obsessive pop-culture talk (which is better, The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars?), great gushing geysers of talk, much of it prickly and obscene and hilarious and, in that Kevin Smith way, so smart about being stupid that the characters' verbosity becomes, in every sense, their saving grace.

In Clerks II, the Quick Stop has been closed down due to a fire. Dante (Brian O'Halloran), the neurotically rational, wheel-spinning underachiever who looks like Charlie Sheen after being whacked with a geek stick, and Randal (Jeff Anderson), that spiky, even less evolved specimen of dedicated...uh, randiness, now work the counter of a Mooby's fast-food franchise. They wear goofy purple uniforms that, if possible, mock their status even more than the Godot-at-the-Ring Dings-rack atmosphere of the convenience store did. Slinging burgers and onion rings to the rare customer who wanders into the place, they jabber, in their nothing-matters/everything-matters way, about such vital topics as Transformers, the Proustian joy of go-carts, the issue of whether two particular body parts should ever meet during sex, and also whether either of these two human zeds plans to get, you know, a future.

Dante, at least, wants one. At 33, he has a tawny, domineering fiancée (Jennifer Schwalbach), and he's planning to go with her to Florida, where he's to spend his life running a car wash. The complicating factor is Dante's boss, played by Rosario Dawson — convincing as a rival love interest, though not necessarily as the manager of a Mooby's. The romantic plot is standard-issue, but the real love story — the one between Dante and Randal — is brought to a satisfying, even touching, conclusion. And I haven't even mentioned the donkey sex, or the way Jay (Jason Mewes), with boom-box backup from Silent Bob (Smith), massages his nips as he replays the killer's dance from The Silence of the Lambs. Talk about touching.

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