Movies

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, July 21, 2006

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

With Clerks II, writer-director Kevin Smith learns that he can go home again in this long-overdue sequel to his 1994 cult smash.

It's outrageous and politically incorrect and dares go where few other movies have. Clerks II is that strange place where romance, racial slurs, drugs, the Bible, The Lord of the Rings, hamburgers and bestiality all collide, often with hilarious results.

In the dozen intervening years Smith made many other films -- Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jersey Girl, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the latter featuring two of the fave slacker characters from Clerks, with Silent Bob played by Smith himself. But none of those films were near as successful as Clerks, a cheaply made, black-and-white, lowball-humored look at life among the clerks and customers at a New Jersey convenience store.

So here is Clerks II -- in Technicolor! yet -- but with life pretty much plugging along at the same deadhead pace for the characters audiences came to love in the first film. The major difference is that now, through circumstances almost beyond their control, Brian O'Halloran's Dante and Jeff Andeson's Randal have moved from the Quick Stop convenience store and adjoining video shop to staff Mooby's, a Jersey hamburger joint. Jay and Silent Bob, who used to stand outside at the Quick Stop, are now stationed outside Mooby's, "still hangin' out and selling weed" as Jay (Jason Mewes) puts it, while Silent Bob is silent on the subject, only rolling his eyes at times in silent response. It's actually their "triumphant return," as the just-out-of-rehab Jay puts it. While in prison he discovered "the power of Christ" and, even though he's selling marijuana, he swears he's not tempted to use it himself anymore. "You should read your Bible man. You'll find all kinds of weird [stuff] in there. Hey, did you know Jesus was a Jew?"

With their oddball slacker view of life, where almost nothing is taken seriously, these guys may be hot on the heels of middle age, but they're still floating through life on low-level jobs. Randal still manages to offend just about everyone -- "What handicapped? The guy's just in a wheelchair. It's not like it's Anne Frank!" he declares, mixing up his frame of reference between Anne Frank and Helen Keller.

O'Halloran's Dante, however, is beginning to feel the aimlessness of his life. He wants to move to Florida and get married to the pretty Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach) whose father has promised to give Dante a job at his car wash and buy them a house as a wedding present. But the vivacious Becky (Rosario Dawson), Dante's boss at Mooby's, has other ideas. Becky doesn't believe in true love, like Dante does, yet she still has feelings and soft memories of that after-hours night in Mooby's kitchen on the food prep table.

Add Elias (Trevor Fehrman), the 19-year-old coworker straight from Bible Camp and harboring serious boy-man issues; blurted racial slurs that Randal thinks are innocent; a raucous musical production number danced to the Jackson 5's "ABC"; and an out-of-bounds bachelor party with bestiality as its centerpiece. "We like to call it interspecies erotica," says the act's leather-clad promoter of the bachelor party "entertainment."

Clearly, this is anything-goes humor. It may be in bad taste, but you're bound to laugh despite yourself.

Most of Clerks II moves at a rampaging pace, although there are a couple of times when Smith gets all philosophical and serious as his characters explore the meanings of friendship and relationships. You may begin to check your watch at these moments, but fortunately Smith knows when enough is enough and quickly gets back on track where enough is never enough when it comes to startling dialogue.

The characters who were older, but not necessarily wiser at the start, do wise up. And they have a wild time getting there.

mjanuson@projo.com / (401) 277-7276

***

Clerks II

Starring: Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Trevor Fehrman.

Rated: R, contains graphic sexual references, profanity, drugs, adult themes.