Fellman's Movie Reviews

Clerks 3 is a 2022 comedy/drama written and directed by Kevin Smith. It is the sequel to Clerks and Clerks 2 and finishes the trilogy. The film stars the main characters of the series, Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, and brings back Trevor Fehrman and Rosario Dawson from the last Clerks movie. There are also cameos from numerous cast members from the previous Clerks movies throughout the film reprising their roles from the original movie. 

I wasn’t a fan of this Clerks movie. It’s actually rather disappointing after seeing the other two movies for this to be how the trilogy ends. This is just a lot of cheap nostalgia and pointless sentimentality for no other reason than to look at it and go “hey, this happened!” I get that’s kind of the point of the movie. But that’s literally my entire point. It’s a weak premise for a movie. They’re old. We get it. There’s funnier stuff about getting older than just remembering when you were younger.  

I thought Elias was a funny character for the entire movie. How he kept changing outfits for every scene. Each one more absurd than the last. That was one of the only real funny parts of the entire film. And it didn’t even have anything to do with the plot. It was like a side gag that nobody was paying any real attention to. But it was funnier than anything that Kevin Smith had written into the script. The script isn’t very good at all. Jay and Silent Bob especially are awful in this movie. Their characters get worse in every movie they’re in. I guess when you come up with somebody like that, you can only keep it going for so long before it just wears itself out. 

But back to the script. After Randall has his heart attack, most of the script is just recreating the original Clerks movie. Or, at least, a parody of recreating the original Clerks movie. And, while it almost seems like a montage, which, it pretty much is, the fact is, there’s no real content there except for taking what happened and pretending it happened now. It’s really not as funny as Kevin Smith thought it was going to be.  

If anything, I’ll say that you should see this movie if you’ve watched the other two, just because you’ve seen the other two, and you should watch it just to finish out the trilogy. For closure if nothing else. But as a standalone movie, it doesn’t really hold up by itself. You really need the context of the first two movies to understand this one. And even then, it’s pretty anticlimactic, if not downright depressing.  

So, yeah. Go and see Clerks 3. Not because it’s a good movie. But more out of obligation than anything else. I’d see it just to see it, and then say I saw it afterwards. So at least you have some frame of reference about the end of the Clerks trilogy. And as always, keep on watching, with a smile on your face…