Clerks III (Movie)

Kevin Smith revisits his convenience store characters, and his life, with this sequel.These days more than ever, personal filmmaking deserves to be celebrated merely for manifesting itself. Which doesn’t mean that personal filmmaking doesn’t come in some confounding forms.From his first feature, the very low-budget, black-and-white “Clerks” (1994), the writer-director Kevin Smith has only ever made movies about himself. Not just himself as a person, but himself as a sensibility: quick-witted, working-class, pop-culture-obsessive wiseass Jersey boy. In “Clerks” he put it across perfectly. In the film’s second sequel, “Clerks III,” he is not nearly as deft.Paradoxically, some of this is because of Smith’s relative maturity. A husband and a father and a heart attack survivor who is now 52, he’s got more on his mind than being a wiseass. Instead of following up the 2006 film “Clerks II” with more of that picture’s profane exuberant absurdity, he brings back Dante and Randal and Jay and Silent Bob and does some stocktaking.The movie is bouncy at first, though the actors Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, so rawly naturalistic in the earlier movies, here seem like they’re doing bits. Still, three words characterize the first third or so of the picture: not funny enough. As in, a new character is nicknamed Blockchain. Which is funnier than that character nicknamed Podcast in the most recent “Ghostbusters” movie, but, you know.Randall has a heart attack, and, realizing he has to make something of his life, decides to direct a movie. About, yes, working at a convenience store. Not funny enough turns to often not funny, a star-studded audition scene (Ben Affleck! Danny Trejo! Freddie Prinze Jr.!) notwithstanding.While Smith has often broken the fourth wall in his pictures, here he uses the make-a-movie plot to go big-time meta. But his idea of meta fails to split the difference between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the French New Novel. It has more the manner of a pinball in a machine that’s about to enter tilt mode.For instance, at one point the trench-coated Silent Bob, played as ever by Smith, breaks character and, as Smith the filmmaker, lectures Randal about the hideous color scheme of a shot he’s framing. The joke falls flat, and not just because Smith’s visual mode is rarely mistaken for that of “The Red Shoes.”The wobbly ending combines the confounding and frequently schticky meta mode with the forced sentimentality of that Nicole Kidman AMC Theaters promo. My rooting interest in Smith notwithstanding (full disclosure: I, too, am a wiseass Jersey boy), it made me wince.Clerks IIIRated R. It’s a Kevin Smith movie. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More