by Philo Gabriel

Created on: September 09, 2009   Last Updated: January 10, 2010

It is a truism that movie sequels are almost never as good as the original. There is no exception to report here.

I liked Kevin Smith's "Clerks" quite a bit. Entertaining from start to finish, plenty of good laughs, but also a charming film on a human level.

"Clerks II" fails to duplicate what made "Clerks" special. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that while it does have some of the same elements, they are not present to the same degree, or even close. It's as if Smith started out with one and a third movies worth of solid, well-written, funny "Clerks"-type material, used a full movie's worth on "Clerks," and now had only that little remainder left to try to stretch out into another movie.

In "Clerks II," Randal the video store clerk (Jeff Anderson) and Dante the convenience store clerk (Brian O'Halloran) move on to jobs at a fast food joint after fire destroys their old digs. Dante is getting cold feet about marrying his lovely but bland fiancée and moving to Florida. He comes to realize he may not be willing to give up his old life, his old neighborhood, his old friends. Matters are complicated further when he realizes he has feelings for his manager (the sultry Rosario Dawson).

The main difference between "Clerks" and its sequel, I think, is "Clerks" is much more realistic. Sure there is oddball stuff, but it's mostly oddball stuff you could imagine really happening. With "Clerks II" though, a lot of the intended humor comes from elements that too obviously would never happen in real life.

In "Clerks," Randal is a stitch - a slacker loser drifting through life, dropping in the occasional hilarious cynical, sexual, and/or scatological pronouncement. But whereas in the original those remarks flowed naturally from conversation, in the sequel everything out of his mouth is a punch line. He's not a full person any more; he's just a mouthpiece for the writers to try to score with "Clerks"-like witticisms. It becomes like watching a mediocre comedian who comes up with a good line maybe 20% of the time, and just drones on and on with clunkers the rest of the time.

If Randal is stripped of the bulk of his personhood and reduced to that degree to an empty caricature, the new cast member - a Christian nerd co-worker of Dante and Randal - never has any personhood beyond being an empty caricature to begin with. He isn't someone you'd meet in real life, or in "Clerks"; he's someone you'd see in bad sketch comedy.

The "donkey" scene has the humor that comes from

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