YMMV / Clerks II

• Adorkable: Elias, a The Lord of the Rings and Transformers-obsessed Jesus freak who's afraid to have sex with his (possibly imaginary) girlfriend because he thinks she has a penis-eating troll that lives in her lady parts.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Becky eventually telling Dante that she loves him despite earlier claiming that she doesn't believe in romantic love. Did she just need defrosting to come to terms with her own romantic feelings, or is she aromantic^note I.E., doesn't experience romantic attraction to anyone in the same way most asexual people don't experience sexual attraction. and Dante was just her exception in the same way many people think Holden was Alyssa's? Dante's conversation with a hallucination of Becky in Clerks III seems to support the latter interpretation.
  • Was Dante genuinely offended by Randal's use of racist terms, or was he simply upset it was in front of black customers and could have gotten Randal or Becky fired?
• Awesome Moments:
  • The entire ending scene in the jail cell. As with the previous movie, it ends with Dante and Randal volleying "reason you suck" speeches at one another, but unlike the last time, Dante actually manages to back Randal into a corner by proving that, unlike Dante, he's not even trying to act his age and be a responsible adult. But when Randal finally throws down the gauntlet, he's got something to say.
  "I'D BUY THE QUICK STOP AND REOPEN IT MYSELF! That's what I'd do. That's what we should do."
  • Randal giving an uncompromisingly biting (and, for some, highly accurate) critique of The Lord of the Rings movies. Not only does Randal keep his cool for the entirety of his dialogue, despite a tough-looking Rings fanboy threatening him to his face to shut up, but it ends up being so cruel that said fanboy throws up in defeat!
  • Meta example — the film was screened out of competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. The audiences, who were unimpressed with "buzzy" films like The Da Vinci Code and Marie Antoinette, gave this film a 10-minute standing ovation. A pre-MeToo Harvey Weinstein, a veteran of Cannes, actually said it was the longest standing ovation he'd ever seen.
• Awesome Music:
  • Talking Heads' "(Nothing But) Flowers" scoring the opening scene. Kevin Smith said that this was one early idea for the film that he insisted on keeping no matter what.
  • Grandma, what was it liiiiiike? and the aforementioned musical number.
  • "1979" by The Smashing Pumpkins playing when everyone is at their lowest in the film.
  • "Naughty Girls Need Love Too", the song that plays during the donkey show.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The dance scene that turns into a full musical number. The dancers include an emo girl, a cheerleader, a girl in full Indian garb, a football player, a bus driver, a woman wearing a barbeque apron, and a nun. The only bearing on the plot that it has is that the scene ends with Dante revealing his love for Becky and in return Becky revealing that she's pregnant.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Randal taking childlike glee bullying a paraplegic guy on the internet is somehow made moot by his love of calling him "crippy boy."
  • Randal's "porch monkey" rant crosses the line way more than twice! And then Elias casually asking "Did Randal just call Mister Dante a nigger?" crosses it about a hundred more times.
  • Kevin Smith once said that the only reason Judd Apatow's films are more marketable than his is because Apatow would draw the line at a donkey show. Smith, on the other hand...
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Invoked. It's clear than Dante and Randal's idea of closure is really just a desperate attempt to cling to some kind of complacency rather than progress with the rest of society, and then they'll forever be stuck in their own past. There's also the Reality Subtext of Technology Marches On, as Randal is reopening a video rental store while Netflix is busy killing the video rental industry, shortly before online streaming finished it off. And the movie makes it clear than Randal cannot and will not adapt to the times.^note RST closed for real a year after this movie came out and remains standing as it was, frozen in time, to this day. In-universe, the store is closed and has been replaced with a Redbox machine in front, and Jay and Silent Bob made the building their headquarters, first using it to sell home-grown weed in Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, then, when weed became legal, turning it into a legal marijuana dispensary which they're running in Clerks III.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Randal's admission that he has sex with "barely-legal pussy" hasn't aged well in light of the #MeToo movement.
  • So much about this movie becomes harder to watch in light of Clerks III.
    • After the buildup to Dante and Becky's romance, including Becky contemplating whether she wants to have their child and Dante deciding he really does want to be a father, both Becky and their unborn daughter are killed by a drunk driver shortly after the events of this movie, putting Dante back at square one. It's little wonder he's left so embittered.
    • Becky counting her car as one of the things she loves. As noted above, it's a car accident that tragically claims her life less than a year later.
    • Try watching the penultimate scene of the movie with Dante, Randal, Elias, and a pregnant Becky doing a grand re-opening of the Quick Stop knowing that half those characters will be dead by the end of Clerks III.
    • "Today is the first day of the rest of our lives". Literally true for Dante, as he works at the Quick Stop until the day he dies, without ever making anything more of his life like he wanted to.
    • In a deleted scene, Randal tells Dante, "I honestly don't know if I can make it in this world without you."
    • After the encounter with Lance Dowds, Randal starts to lament that he'll never amount to anything, only to end the movie making peace with his lot in life. His fear of never accomplishing anything returns in the next movie, as it becomes his motivation for making a movie after surviving a heart attack.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: On a bittersweet note, Randal mentioning that Elias will become his new best friend if Dante leaves, which comes to fruition when Dante passes away in III. Lampshaded by Randal himself in that movie.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "You never go ass-to-mouth!" Even more since Smith would still later describe his own film Tusk as "a cuddly version" of that one.
  • Randal's "a lot of walking" complaint in regards to The Lord of the Rings trilogy happens to be the general complaint in regards to The Hobbit films, which happens to be more critically divided when compared to the previous films.
  • With the timing on each film trilogy, the age division ironically means that LOTR fans are most likely Randall's age while the Star Wars fans are a similar age to Elias. To say nothing of the division between those who prefer the original Star Wars trilogy to the new Contested Sequels and those who like them just fine.
• Ho Yay: Randal and Dante.

  Randal: (to Dante) You're my best friend, and I love you. In a totally heterosexual way.
  Jay: (to Silent Bob) Yeah, right.

  • Not to mention the fact that their every argument sounds like a lover's tiff.
  • Jay demands that Dante and Randal engage in oral sex (and then engage in ass-to-mouth) before he'll give them the money. Bob gives him a funny look and he takes it back. In a cut scene, Bob follows up by telling Jay that he's "just a gay man in deep denial."
  • There's also Silent Bob mouthing "Sit down, girl! I think I love ya!" to Jay, then twirling him in his arms during the "ABC" segment.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Some people will agree that Randal was totally right about The Return of the King having way too many endings, and the "very fucking gay look" that Sam gave Frodo near the end.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Emma is a controlling shrew, but she still didn't deserve to walk in on her fiance kissing another woman, then finding out that said other woman is pregnant with Dante's child.
  • Randal at the end, when he reveals how much he has been dreading Dante moving away.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • PORCH MONKEY 4 LIFE.
  • "It's cool. I'm/We're taking it back."
• Misaimed Fandom: Guess how many people actually get that Randal is supposed to be 'wrong' in the Porch Monkey scene? Not very many.
• One-Scene Wonder: Hey kids, its Jason Lee/Ben Affleck/Ethan Suplee/Earthquake/Wanda Sykes/Kevin's Mom! (APPLAUSE)
• Shallow Parody: According to Randal, the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy is just two hobbits walking from the left of the screen to the right of the screen. Then, in the third movie, they drop the ring into an abyss.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The entire second-to-last scene where Dante and Randal volley accusations at one another, but especially Randal's Did You Think I Can't Feel? speech and eventual Platonic Declaration of Love. The whole time, he sounds like he's fighting back tears as he slowly lets his guard down.
  • The implication that Dante either never got back together with Veronica, or he did and they've since broken up for good.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Becky's speech attacking the concept of romantic love is an intriguing point of view that she argues quite cogently; by the end of the film (within hours, in fact), she's tossed this philosophy over the side and acceded to a thoroughly conventional romantic relationship while effectively implying what she'd said earlier was all just rationalization to avoid admitting her attraction to Dante. Clerks III actually takes a moment to address this when Dante, speaking to a hallucination/spirit of Becky, says he thought she didn't believe in romantic love, and Becky reaffirms that no, she doesn't, but she does believe in Dante.
• Win Back the Crowd: After the slightly divisive Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and the generally unpopular Jersey Girl, the film was widely seen as a return to form for Kevin Smith. In retrospect however, it's generally viewed as a brief respite before Smith's Hollywood career completely crumbled and he's since taken to doing films that are nothing like his older ones.

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