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Clerks (1994)

★★★½ — Clerks (1994)

Kevin Smith shot Clerks in the New Jersey convenience store where he actually worked, filming overnight after closing time to keep costs down, and the finished film reportedly cost around $27,000, much of it charged across multiple credit cards and supplemented by a small insurance payout from a flood-damaged car. Shot in black and white partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because colour stock was too expensive, it was picked up by Miramax at Sundance in 1994 and went on to gross over three million dollars at the box office, a remarkable return on that outlay. Smith was twenty-three when he made it, and it launched the View Askew universe he would extend through Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and beyond.

Clerks is raw, scrappy, and brilliantly unpolished. A black-and-white, no-budget miracle that launched Kevin Smith’s career and quietly redefined indie comedy in the 90s. Shot in the actual convenience store where Smith worked, funded by maxed-out credit cards and favours, it’s a film that feels lived-in, real, and defiantly anti-Hollywood. There’s no plot to speak of, just Dante working a dead-end shift at Quick Stop, arguing with customers, his best mate Randal, and the universe in general. And somehow, that’s more than enough. What makes Clerks so enduring is its voice. Sharp, sarcastic, obsessed with Star Wars, and the soul-crushing boredom of minimum-wage life. It’s a film about slacking off that somehow feels urgent. Brian O’Halloran’s weary straight-man performance and Jeff Anderson’s gloriously lazy Randal are perfectly pitched, and the dialogue feels like real, aimless conversation, only funnier, smarter, and packed with more pop-culture rants than you can count. It’s philosophy in a hockey jersey, existential dread behind a counter. Smith never topped it, not really. Mallrats was messier, Chasing Amy more ambitious but uneven, Dogma too self-conscious, and the Jay and Silent Bob films increasingly meta and nostalgic. But Clerks stands apart, unburdened by franchise-building, uninterested in being anything other than what it is: a funny, angry, clever snapshot of young men stuck in place, talking their way through another day. It’s Kevin Smith at his most honest, most vital, and funniest. Arguably his best and definitely his truest.

Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1994 | Watched: 2025-08-21

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Where to watch (UK)

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