by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

I first saw Clerks when my parents rented it in 1995. It was enough of a minor sensation for my relatively normal parents to rent it—they had their eyes opened to the wonders of independent cinema after seeing Pulp Fiction the year prior—and while I, a mere 10-year-old, was strictly forbidden from watching it, that didn’t stop me from sneaking a peek after they went to bed. I hated it. It was in black and white! It was just two dudes talking and cursing! What the hell was up with those two guys dancing outside the video store?!

Five years later in my little cinematic incubator that developed when I found out you could get movies for free at the library, I got obsessed with Smith’s sophomore feature Mallrats and decided to revisit Clerks. I loved it. It was in black and white (so artistic)! It was just two dudes talking and cursing (Such great dialogue)! Jay and Silent Bob are hilarious snootchie bootchies! Kevin Smith’s early oeuvre was tailor made for teenage boys, and I was no exception. I mean, I would put on the Mallrats audio commentary like a security blanket. I made my dad take me and a friend to see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in theaters despite how awkward I knew it would be. I was a superfan.

And like a lot of Smith fans, I grew out of it. Quotes like “I too hope to cum loud, preferably in a 69” tend to wear out as you get older and see more movies. Not that there isn’t a place for crude humor, Judd Apatow made his nut on it and there are three goddamn Hangover movies for christsake, but Smith’s humor is often embarrassingly dumb. On top of that his shortcomings as a director stick out when the dialogue is so bad you want to crawl into a hole and never come out. This coming from the guy who built his career on great dialogue! In the wake of Clerks III bringing Smith’s canon full circle, let’s take a look back at Smith’s career.

The Golden Age – 1994-2001Clerks/Mallrats/Chasing Amy/Dogma/Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

I think if you told Kevin Smith that his little movie about convenience store clerks thrown together on a shoestring budget and cast mostly with his friends would be selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in 2019 for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” you would have got a solid, “Get the fuck out of here.”

Shot for under $30,000 dollars, Clerks made over $4 million in theaters with the Miramax rocket strapped to its back and changed independent cinema forever. Like I mentioned earlier, the buzz around this little no-budget black and white comedy creeped into the most sanitized corners of suburban America, places typically only reached by the big tentpole blockbusters.

The thing is, even though Clerks captures the zeitgeist of the mid-90s, the film still holds up remarkably well today. I feel like I get the itch to watch Clerks every five years, and every time I finish it’s just like, “Damn, what a great movie.” Smith puts his whole self into this thing and the result is proof that with enough creative spirit and effort you can make a great film that will stand the test of time for basically nothing. It’s one of cinema’s great success stories, not just of the 90s, but of all time.

Smith channeled all of the goodwill he earned with Clerks into a movie about a bunch of slackers who like to hangout at the mall. 1995’s Mallrats was pretty much routinely panned, but made up for the critical hate with a cult following once it came out on VHS. I was among this cult, and even as my diehard Kevin Smith fandom waned in the early 00s, I still counted Mallrats as my favorite Smith picture (see above). A lot of that has to do with Jason Lee’s infinitely charismatic portrayal as the lovable asshole Brodie Bruce. Mallrats feels like Smith’s cinematic safe space, and you see him go back to this world of childish slacker humor after every big career speedbump (i.e. Clerks II (which plays more like Mallrats than Clerks after Jersey Girl, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot after Yoga Hosers).

Mallrats works better than all of those movies because at this point in his career, Smith didn’t really have an agenda. Sure, the expectations were high after the breakout success of Clerks, but at its heart Mallrats is just good clean fun. Well, maybe not clean (a major plot point involves a character eating a butt-sweat tainted chocolate covered pretzel), but that people like Roger Ebert hated this film so intensely still doesn’t make any sense. It’s dumb, it’s fun, it’s nerdy as hell, and the film’s cult following proved that despite the critical backlash Smith didn’t really suffer a sophomore slump.

Chasing Amy, on the other hand, was uncharted territory for Smith: A drama. Well, more of a dramedy, but the core plot revolves around Ben Affleck’s Holden falling in love with Joey Lauren Adams’ Alyssa, a lesbian, and all of the problematic baggage that comes with a straight white dude writing this kind of story. It’s a movie that has continued to age like milk as the years wear on, and I still feel kind of bad that I still like this movie. The way this plot resolves itself–Holden “converts” Alyssa from her gayness (sexuality is a binary here), gets mad when he finds out he wasn’t the first dude she slept with, and his solution is to…propose a threeway with him, Alyssa, and his comic book writing partner Banky (Jason Lee)--is decidedly not good. Very bad. Ugly in all sorts of ways. But there’s something really endearing about the three lead performances that I get sucked in by every time and even with all the huge flaws in the screenplay, Smith obviously put a lot of heart into this one. 

Smith went further outside of his comfort zone with 1999’s Dogma, a satirical skewering of the Catholic Church. Smith’s filmmaking shortcomings are on full display here as they struggle to meet the high concept plot, but the cast is so unique–Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, George Carlin, Jason Lee, Alan Rickman, and Salma Hayek with Alanis Morrisette playing God is as close to a 90s movie Murderer’s Row as it gets–and the jokes are pretty good (I have a dashboard Buddy Christ packed away in a box somewhere) that it offsets how dated the movie feels now. It’s clunky, but ambitious, and worth watching for Carlin’s role as a Catholic priest alone.

Smith closed out his golden years by tying together all the View Askewniverse movies (sans Dogma) into a big blowout in the shape of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Revisiting this one for the first time in 20 years was the one that hurt the most. It’s more palatable than its 2019 sequel Jay and Silent Bob Reboot because it is very much of a sort of 90s raunchy comedy that you could still get away with making back then (even though this came out in 2001). The cameos are all a ton of fun (the one where Jay and Silent Bob crash the set of Good Will Hunting II: Hunting Season with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon playing magnificent parodies of themselves while Gus Van Sant counts a literal bag of money with a dollar sign on it is still solid gold) but the problem with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is that Jay is the de facto protagonist and his schtick is a lot to take for an hour and forty-five minutes. Good in small doses as we’ve seen in all the previously discussed movies, but hearing him blather on about bitches and nutting and blunts and the other problematic shit that is fine when the character is a sideshow, but when he’s the hero? Woof. 

If Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back shows us one thing, it’s that after branching out, Kevin Smith fell back on the kind of sophomoric comedies he clearly loves to make. Far be it from me to drag a filmmaker for making the kinds of movies he wants to make, but where Dogma hinted that Smith was going to continue bringing his idiosyncratic storytelling to wider audiences, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back hit the reset button and the period that followed this one found the director stuck between trying to reach that wider audience and retreating to the safety of his cult following.

The Directionless See-Sawing Middle Period – 2004-2010Jersey Girl/Clerks II/Zack and Miri Make a Porno/Cop Out

Smith’s transition away from the “View Askewniverse” his first five films exist in was…weird. If anything, it highlighted Smith’s shortcomings as a filmmaker. Without being able to rely on the hijinx of Jay and Silent Bob and compensating for his weaknesses with witty, nerdy dialogue, we got a set of films in the late 00s that no one really remembers. Well, except for Clerks II, which is the most entertaining of the lot, and makes Smith’s return to the View Askewniverse in the late 2010s/early 2020s wholly understandable. 

Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back follow-up Jersey Girl is mostly remembered for getting lumped in with that other Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez vehicle from the early 00s, Gigli. So much so they had to take J Lo out of the promotional materials in an attempt to sever the connection (as Gigli roundly pops up on anyone and everyone’s Worst Movies Ever Made list). All of this despite the fact that J Lo is only in the movie for like 10 minutes before she is killed off because hey, this is a movie about a single dad after all.

Though Jersey Girl tends to get a lot of flak, it’s not as bad as you remember it. Or at least not as bad as I remember it, being one of those mouth breathers who was butthurt that Smith was abandoning the View Askewniverse. Watching it now, as a grown ass man, I get it. Smith was a new dad and channeled those big feelings into something outside of his wheelhouse, but with just enough of his trademark wit to keep the thing from becoming a generic dramedy. I mean, the movie culminates with the Affleck character’s kid performing in Sweeney Todd at her elementary school, which is as weird and wonderful as you’d expect. Still, Jersey Girl feels lost to the sands of time due to all the hate it got up front, and while it’s not a masterpiece or anything, it’s heartfelt and sweet and undeserving of any of the malice that gets dumped on it. 

That said, Smith was surely reeling from the blowback when he committed to Clerks II as his next feature. What better way to appease his loyal cult following than by going back to the well for another round of Dante, Randal, Jay and Silent Bob. What’s most interesting about Clerks II is that it shows how much Smith’s cinematic language evolved between 1994 and 2006, given how different the sequel is from the original.

The Quick Stop has burned down and Dante and Randal find themselves working at a Mooby’s fast food joint. It’s the sort of change of scenery that can help justify a sequel’s existence, and though Smith’s jokes have started falling flatter at this point in his career, he keeps the story honed on Dante and Randal’s bromance enough to make Clerks II the standout from this era. Yes, there is a whole thing with a homoerotic donkey show that takes things over the shark, but Smith reinforces the film’s theme of living your best life and not settling that it comes across as a coherent film (something Smith’s films will struggle with from this point on). 

2008’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno is…a movie I almost left off this list because I straight up forgot it was a Kevin Smith movie. I remember going to see it in the theaters, and I remember liking it alright, and that’s about it. You can only tell it’s a Kevin Smith movie because Jason Mewes and Jeff Anderson pop up in it, but otherwise it’s a fine mid-00s raunchy comedy in the vein of The 40 Year Old Virgin. Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks are both infinitely charismatic leads and they make this story about two platonic friends who decide to make a porn together to ease some financial woes worth a look. It’s bound to be lost to time, as it was lost to my own memory, but as much as I rag on Smith for his stylistic meh-ness, there is a sequence in this movie set to the Pixies tune “Hey” that is probably the most compelling scene in Smith’s whole filmography. 

The best thing to come out of 2010’s Cop Out has been Kevin Smith openly trashing on Bruce Willis in the decade plus since it was released. It was the first and so far only time Smith has directed someone else’s screenplay, and this generic play on the buddy cop movie starring Willis and Tracey Morgan is as empty as it gets. Kudos to Smith for trying to work within the Hollywood system, and to his credit this movie would have been a total dog even if Martin Scorsese was helming the thing. It’s the sort of debacle that primes a director for a career reset, and what a career reset we got.

The Podcast Horror Years – 2011-2016 Red State/Tusk/Yoga Hosers

Kevin Smith’s foray into horror is something no one could have predicted. It’s such a tonal shift from his talky, goofy comedies. So you’d be right to be dubious about a movie like 2011’s Red State—a straight horror vehicle about a group of teenage boys kidnapped by a fanatical conservative Christian church—and you’d be wrong if you didn’t come away impressed that Smith was able to nail that tonal shift with aplomb. Maybe Red State just hits different for me having grown up in Kansas, an hour drive from Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka who served as the inspiration for the film’s wacked out Christian cult. Considering how lighthearted Smith’s filmography had been up to this point, it helps Red State’s shocking brutality hit even harder. Where Dogma playfully jabbed at organized religion, Red State stuck a knife in its beating heart. Though the returns on Smith’s descent into horror diminished, Red State still holds up a grindhouse midnight movie kind of horror flick.

Tusk was the biggest surprise to come out of this whole project because despite thinking the whole “Justin Long gets turned into a walrus by a psychopath” plot was above me, I ended up enjoying the movie quite a bit! It’s sillier in tone than Red State because it has to be, and the plot is so bonkers that you just have to admire how insane it is. Justin Long is great, sure, but Michael Parks steals the show as the calmly deranged walrus-obsessed lunatic. There is a whole subplot where Long’s character’s friends work with a Quebecois manhunter played by Johnny Depp that makes your bones hurt and is another shining example of Smith being unable to get out of his own way, but the sight of Long’s human-walrus hybrid is the sort of nightmare fuel you watch horror movies for. 

Yoga Hosers mostly just feels like an excuse for Smith to let his daughter Harley Quinn Smith and her best friend Lily-Rose Depp make a movie together and the less said about this one the better. Of all the Smodcast inspired films, this is the one that feels most like an in-joke that leaves any non-listeners on the outside looking in. To make things somehow even more excruciating, Johnny Depp’s Quebecois manhunter Guy LaPointe returns. There are Canadian nazis made out of bratwurst. It is all so very dumb and feels like, something that would be made and distributed as a Patreon exclusive as a goof. It’s the sort of bad that makes you wonder, “Is this the end of Kevin Smith?” and though Smith would never admit it, this ignoble end to his dalliance in the horror genre was a perfect excuse to go back to the well and revisit the ghosts of Kevin Smith movies past.

The Back to the Well Period – 2019-Present Jay and Silent Bob Reboot/Clerks III

Though the Mallrats sequel Twilight of the Mallrats is only listed as being in pre-production on IMDB, it would make a ton of sense for it to be Smith’s next feature. Smith’s latest films have been focused on revisiting his earlier films with mixed results. 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is ostensibly a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and it might even surpass Yoga Hosers as the worst film in Smith’s filmography, which is saying a lot. It has nothing new to say and somehow managed to tarnish my nostalgic feelings about Strike Back. It’s “man this is so bad I can’t believe I ever liked this” bad. Like all of his recent films, it primarily serves as a vehicle to advance his daughter’s acting career. Which, I mean, as a dad I get it. And you can tell how much fun he is having when he watches his daughter monologue about how much of a hack “Kevin Smith” is (in Reboot, hack director “Kevin Smith” (played by, you guessed it, Kevin Smith) is helming the Bluntman & Chronic reboot movie). While he no doubt had a blast making the movie, it’s borderline unwatchable to the point that it cast its cringey shadow on Clerks III.

Fortunately, Clerks III managed to deliver enough of the good stuff that reminded you why you fell in love with Smith’s early films in the first place. It’s still full of cringeworthy elements wrought out of Smith’s seeming defiance of filmmaking conventions, but when the film focuses on the bromance between Dante and Randal in middle age, it achieves genuine emotional resonance (which had at least been absent from Smith’s oeuvre since Red State or maybe Zack and Miri, depending on who you ask).

Where Smith uses Jay and Silent Bob Reboot to reflect on his career as a sort of lampoon, Clerks III’s plot about the titular clerks making a movie (which turns out to be them shooting the original Clerks) lets Smith comment on his career in a way that feels more honest and satisfying. It doesn’t always work, and it often feels like Smith is constantly getting in the way of the story that wants to be told.

At this point in his career, it’s hard to see Smith doing anything but catering to the niche that already loves his work, podcast, etc. And that’s fine! While he’ll likely never make another movie with crossover potential like Clerks (the fallout from Cop Out feels like a death knell for Smith ever operating within the studio system ever again), the people that like his movies like his movies and honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. Hunkering down and watching the movies I missed from Smith’s filmography reminded me that his movies not being for everyone is a feature and not a bug, at least in Smith’s eyes. They’re movies made for his adoring fans who will be far more forgiving than the general public. At this point in his career his movies feel like a sort of inside joke and if you’re on the outside, well, there is plenty of other stuff to watch.