Clerks II (2006)

Clerks II arrives twelve years after the original, close enough to a decade for the View Askewniverse's purposes, and finds Dante and Randal relocated from the burned-out Quick Stop to a Mooby's fast food franchise in suburban New Jersey. Kevin Smith's camera has learned color, though the bookends retreat to black and white out of what appears to be sentiment. This is a sequel in the strictest sense: same characters, same parking lot, same arguments, now with a donkey.

That donkey is the matter at hand. The centerpiece going-away party, staged by Randal as a tribute to his friend, involves a live animal and a fog machine, and it is played entirely for shock. Rosario Dawson plays Becky, the manager, and she brings a warmth the film does not deserve and cannot quite use. Her presence is the lone concession to a broader world. The screenplay's treatment of race amounts to a scene where the characters debate whether a slur is acceptable in mixed company, and the film treats this as a provocation rather than a question with an answer. Elias, the devout Christian teenager, is mocked for his abstinence and his Transformers fixation, and the film has no vocabulary for anything resembling neurodivergence. The humor is male, crude, and committed.

The film's politics are the politics of refusing to grow up. Mooby's stands in for corporate conformity, minimum wage, and the slow death of ambition, and the heroes reject all of it in favor of buying the convenience store themselves. This is slacker individualism wearing a moral position as a costume, and A. O. Scott was right to call it disdain for the rat race. There is no systemic critique here, no climate anxiety, no body politics, no revision of anything. Smith's characters talk at length about Star Wars, religion, and sex, and the talk is a riff, not a sermon. The film wants to be liked, and mostly it is. It simply has nothing to say to the present moment, which in 2006 was not yet a failing.