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Watching “Clerks 2” is like dropping in on old friends whom you haven’t seen for a few years, but are genuinely curious to see if they’ve made anything of themselves. The good news is that they’re still as riotously funny as they always were, thanks to the sharp, topical and downright offensive dialogue by writer/director Kevin Smith. The arguable bad news is that they’re still the same do-nothing, go-nowhere losers as they were in the 1994 original, but really — would we want it any other way?
There has been one big change in the lives of clerks Dante and Randal, however: the Quick Stop and RST Video Store have burned down, so they’re now working at Mooby’s, a McDonald’s-like restaurant that’s just as tedious as their old jobs, except with the added responsibility/burden of handling food.
Dante (Brian O’Halloran) is engaged to Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach, Smith’s wife), an overbearing blond cutie who’s forcing him to leave New Jersey and take a job at her father’s carwash business in Florida. Making his life more complicated is the fact that he’s actually in love with his boss, Becky (Rosario Dawson), and is only settling down because he feels like he’s supposed to, not because he wants to.
Randal (Jeff Anderson), on the other hand, is the exact same foul-mouthed, antagonistic girl-chaser he always was, except older and more bitter that he hasn’t done more with his life. It is through Randal that Smith does some of his best writing, aided by the fact that Anderson’s callous delivery never fails to garner a laugh.
The reason we like these guys, it seems, is because they appeal to the slacker in all of us. They have a modicum of brains, sure, and talk the guy talk as well as anyone. But they’re also fallibly human, and deal with emotion in the same way that repressed, machismo-laden men have been begrudgingly expressing themselves for years.
Much of the humor — and the reason “Clerks” was such a huge hit — is based on topics rarely discussed in movies. Who else but someone as abrasive as Randal would not know the difference between Anne Frank and Helen Keller, or insist that “porch monkey” is not a racial slur against African-Americans? And who but Smith would write dialogue in which characters raucously argue about whether the “Lords of the Rings” or original “Star Wars” trilogy is superior? Let alone Randal’s sermon on the reasons for watching porn, his hatred for everyone but Dante, and his fascination with interspecies sex.
Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) also return as dope-peddling loiterers who now hang out outside of Mooby’s, and Ben Affleck, Jason Lee and Wanda Sykes have cameos as disgruntled customers.
Is this as funny as the original “Clerks”? No, because Smith’s fresh, profanity-laden writing in the original seemed completely natural and spontaneous, as if we were truly observing the conversations of two bored, malcontent friends.
As a consequence of this, the dialogue in the sequel inevitably seems a little forced; this does not, however, change how laugh-out-loud funny the movie is. We didn’t need to have a sequel to “Clerks,” and for a long time Smith didn’t want to make one. But fans of the original and newcomers will be glad he did.
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