Clerks II  ★★★½

FOLLOWING the surprise success of ultra-low budget comedy Clerks in 1994 it took writer/director Kevin Smith 12 years to bring a sequel to the screen.

The wait was kind of worth it. It’s great to have all the main characters back for Clerks II and there are many humorous moments.

But the 2006 film is actually more of a standard rom-com than Smith would want to admit, with only one really gross-out comic sequence.

Smith’s commentary on the meaning and trivialities of life is still there, but the narrative gives way more to the relationship between Brian O’Halloran’s Dante and his boss, played by Rosario Dawson, and the nihilistic attitudes of Jeff Anderson’s professional slacker Randal.

It’s set a decade after the events of the first film. In the opening sequence Dante is still working at the Quick Stop convenience store but arrives one morning to find it ablaze, thanks to Randal accidentally leaving a coffee pot on a stove.

We cut to another year later and find the pair employed at a fast food restaurant called Mooby’s where Dante is still doing most of the work and taking all the responsibility while Randal continues to abuse customers and take the piss out of his co-workers. Meanwhile, drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob have also relocated from the front of the Quick Stop to the front of Mooby’s.

Unlike Clerks, the sequel was shot in colour and had a much greater budget to spend. It may not have all the charm or freshness of the original, but Clerks II still has the vein of roguish humour thumbing its nose at the worst excesses of political correctness that remains Smith’s trademark to this day.