SummaryFollowing a massive heart attack, Randal enlists his friends and fellow clerks Dante, Elias, Jay, and Silent Bob to make a movie immortalizing his life at the convenience store that started it all.
SummaryFollowing a massive heart attack, Randal enlists his friends and fellow clerks Dante, Elias, Jay, and Silent Bob to make a movie immortalizing his life at the convenience store that started it all.
In Clerks III, Smith returns to where his career began and has made one of his best films in decades, a tender and compassionate look at friendships that last no matter what, a remembrance of where Smith came from, and an appreciation for all those who helped him along the way.
Clerks III is serious to a minor fault and breezy to a minor fault. It’s got all the same laid-back, chill vibes cinema that Smith is well-known for, and the same immature approach to genuine maturity that he’s also known for, with a new sense of emotional severity that makes it harder to laugh than it probably should be.
While it’s not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, “Clerks III” is an achievement for Smith and definitive proof that the filmmaker is maturing.
Clerks III is far from a perfect film. Absolutely drenched in masturbatory nostalgia and teeming with timely Marvel references, it milks the last drop of creative potential these nearly 30-year-old characters are capable of providing. Yet, somehow, these marked setbacks don’t completely bog the film down.
More of a recognition reel for a fan convention than a movie, it signals a career that’s traveled far from its first evocation of a raw seriocomic intelligence about small-to-bursting lives. Now, it’s a closed loop only for die-hards.
Ultimately, the absence of any meaningful sentiment about grief or personal growth (or anything else) makes the story’s maddening, rote familiarity feel especially lazy—which is why Clerks III lives up to the legacy of its uninspired characters in all of the wrong ways.
This film has a lot of heart to it. Kevin Smith bookends his Clerks saga with a heartfelt ending filled with all the dirty jokes, sweet moments, and nerdy references along the way. If you're a fan of Kevin Smith's View Askewniverse films this movie will have you in tears.
Not as good as the first two Clerks movies. At times it gets a little too meta and self-referential and dumb, but it filled me with some nostalgia and made me laugh at some scenes.
Just a shell of itself Kevin Smith has no self awareness of how unfunny and self censoring he is…it would have been great if they turned it into a buddy road trip movie for a new heart and mad fun of all the craziness 2020’s has been doing ..there’s so much material out there and they know it. They use to be counter culture now they are for the machine and it’s very sad…horrible movie should have never been made
Remember-whens and on-the-nose self-insertions. Hollywood at this point is so creatively bankrupt, and yes, Smith counts as Hollywood these days. Solid acting kneecapped by mediocre writing. Randal & Dante makes a movie. Jay & Silent Bob makes a movie. Zack and Miri makes a movie. It's Just Kevin Smith that couldn't be bothered. Clerks 3: Remember when I made cool movies