I have always been a huge fan of Kevin Smith’s work. From Clerks, to Dogma, to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, I have always admired his movies. However, with his last movie, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, I slowly started to lose my faith in Smith. When I saw that he was making Clerks III, I was excited because I have always been a fan of anything related to Clerks. Whether it be the original movie, Clerks, or even the underrated Clerks: The Animated Series, and Clerks II, I have always been a fan. I was also a bit skeptical with how poor Jay and Silent Bob Reboot was. I was a fool to be skeptical. 

   Clerks III follows the events of Clerks II in which Dante Hicks and Randal Graves buy the place where they used to work: The Quick Stop. The two of them work together, along with their friend, Elias Grover. At the beginning of the movie, Randal suffers a heart attack, and after he gets out of the hospital, he starts to question everything that he did with his life.

   After talking to Dante about different movies that he likes, Dante told Randal that he always thought that he could make a pretty good movie. Randal then goes on to make his own movie about the two of them working at the Quick Stop and what kind of things they talk about and what customers they got at the store. The rest of the movie follows Randal making his movie.

   This movie actually almost didn’t come out for the longest time. Jeff Anderson, who plays Randal, and Smith had a falling out, and he declined to come back for Clerks III. However, when he heard what Clerks III was about, he was on board, and he and Smith made amends.

   “I thought the story of it was a cool thing,” said Anderson (Slashfilm). “I don’t know that it’s ever been done, that somebody has recreated a movie in a movie like this, a 30-year-old movie.”

   Anderson may have a point, as the story of the movie was really entertaining. Yes, it borrowed most of the plot points from Clerks, and maybe that’s why the movie was enjoyable. It was so similar to Clerks, and maybe to a fault. 

   A lot of Smith’s movies have a tendency to be extremely meta. In this movie, they even acknowledged that the scenes they were making were basically the same as the original Clerks movie. The new scenes were good because the original Clerks movie was good, and that is a problem. I would have liked to see more new content. The new content that was shown was really promising, and it’s disappointing to me that there wasn’t much of it.

   Clerks III was a good movie, but not in the way that I wanted it to be. It was enjoyable purely because I had nostalgia for the first movie, and it’s disappointing because I know just how talented Smith is.