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100Ultimately, Smith finally achieves that perfect balance between humor and heart that he's been dancing towards with all his films.
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83It mostly manages the impressive feat of mixing jaw-droppingly gross jokes with characters that are worth caring about.
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80Kevin Smith's most enjoyable film since, well, Clerks lacks much of its predecessor's outsider edge, but you'll probably be laughing too hard to care.
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80Clerks II finds Smith up to the profane, raunchy, profoundly humanist mischief of which he alone is the master. This is a lewd, lascivious, exhilaratingly life-affirming celebration of misfits and the misfits who love them.
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78Clerks II will find Kevin Smith's detractors saying that the filmmaker simply regurgitates the past, while his loyal fan base will applaud his return to the tried and true.
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75Despite the film's sloppy structure, it feels weirdly good to hang out with these losers again.
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75Dawson turns out to be a necessary ingredient, propelling the emotional core of the film forward, while somehow convincing the audience that a smart, attractive woman could find a schlub like Dante desirable.
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75This is a funny movie. It delivers plenty of laughs, but it isn't in the same league as "Clerks." I left that movie holding my stomach from laughing so hard.
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75An agreeable mischievous romp.
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75Yes, the characters in Clerks II hardly qualify as role models, but they can be blisteringly funny in an in-your-face, to-heck-with-taste way.
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70It has enough laughs, character arcs, politically incorrect rants and a satisfying emotional ending to more than justify this whim on Smith's part.
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70Clerks II has its problems: It rambles into sentimentality, and it doesn't need to -- the movie is more affecting when the characters are just cracking jokes. But Smith, an inherent optimist, has made a movie full of crude humor that also manages to explore the enduring qualities of friendship.
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70This is the umpteenth movie I’ve seen this year about guys in their 30s who aren't quite sure what they want to do with their lives, and it's the only one that strikes a real chord, because it's neither an exaltation nor a condemnation of slackerdom, but rather just a sweet little fable about how sometimes the life that you think could be so much better is actually pretty damn good already.
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70What makes Clerks II both winning and (somewhat unexpectedly) moving is its fidelity to the original "Clerks" ethic of hanging out, talking trash and refusing all worldly ambition.
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70A softer, flabbier and considerably higher-budgeted follow-up to Kevin Smith's 1994 indie sensation that nevertheless packs enough riotous exchanges and pungent sexual obscenities to make its 97 minutes pass by with ease.
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67By this point, the rhythms of Smith's dialogue are as predictable and mannered as haikus, and like sitcoms, Clerks II is mostly appealing in its familiarity, from the rat-a-tat cussing to the cameos from Smith's repertory company to the extended riffing on "Star Wars" and geek culture.
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63Best of all, Jason Mewes is out of rehab to play Jay and spar with Smith as Silent Bob, his dope-dealing partner.
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More sentimental and ruder than its predecessor, though its brand of raunch tends to curdle halfway out of the characters' mouths.
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63Some of the banter is fun, like Randal's debate with Elias over the relative merits of "Star Wars" vs. "The Lord of the Rings." But most is just trash-talk as shoptalk.
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Kevin Smith's Clerks II doesn't take much notice of anything that's happened since the 1994 original. It's occasionally clever and gets a few points for originality.
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63If not precisely poetic in its elaborate offensiveness, it's certainly imaginative. Unfortunately, that's not the same as interesting or engaging, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool fan.
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63With Clerks II, the director retreats to home turf, but is Smith playing it safe or is he really interested in seeing how the old nabe has changed? Bit of both, actually.
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58The attitude is older, maybe a tad sentimental, and as adolescent and reckless as ever. Whether that's a good thing depends on your appreciation for dead-end conversations, geek debates and the Smithspeak sandbox of creative vulgarity.
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50While these individually diverting factors add up to a good time, they don't add up to a good movie.
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50It's the crude humor that trips up the movie.
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50Part of the Clerks charm was that Kevin Smith made it for $27,000, and a bigger budget doesn't really help this kind of tale's authenticity.
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50Feels a little like the new "Pirates of the Caribbean" -- a similar wet fizzle of a sequel for sequel's sake -- but what do we know?
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50In place of the sharply etched observational humor of the original, which featured a host of no-name actors in memorably quirky performances, we now get mostly raunch and some flaccid cameos from Smith cronies Ben Affleck and Jason Lee.
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Clerks II can't bear the strain of its amateur-hour theatrics, no matter how big its heart or how many crocodile tears it manages to squirt. The dramatic moments become melodramatic; the bawdy moments turn icky. The fans will eat it up.