I Assure You, It's Terrible

Look on Clerks III, ye Mighty, and despair

Jeff Anderson and Brian O’Halloran in Clerks III

I like Clerks as much as the next guy and Clerks II a good deal more than the next guy, so I gave this 16-years-later threequel the benefit of the doubt despite how dire Kevin Smith’s recent output has been. Clerks III is better than the likes of Tusk and Yoga Hosers, I suppose, but only just — almost every single scene is either a reference to or literal recreation of one from the original film, which is obviously the point in this meta comedy but so dreadful in its execution that I spent much of the runtime in genuine disbelief that something so lazy and uninspired actually got made. I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever seen a sequel that put less effort into expanding on its source material in any meaningful way. Smith has made a conscious decision over the last decade or so to only make movies for people who already subscribe to his podcast and intentionally alienate everyone else, and while he’s well within his rights to do so it’s pretty sad to see from an outsider’s perspective. It’s memberberries all the way down. The original is endlessly quotable, but in writing this one the way he did — which is to say, by simply quoting his own movie ad nauseam — Smith has doomed Clerks III to a fate he surely considers terrible: never being quoted itself.