Clerks (1994)
★★★½ — Clerks (1994)
There's a moment in Clerks where Randal, standing behind a video rental counter he clearly couldn't care less about, rings up a customer at the shop next door while simultaneously managing to be rude to everyone in both establishments at once. It's petty, pointless, and absolutely perfect. That's the film in miniature: small-scale, defiant, and somehow completely alive.
Kevin Smith shot this thing in the actual convenience store where he worked, after hours, on maxed-out credit cards and borrowed goodwill. It's grainy, black-and-white, and rough around every edge you can find. And none of that matters one bit, because Clerks has something that no amount of studio money can manufacture: a genuine voice. Sharp, sarcastic, philosophically restless, and absolutely obsessed with Star Wars. It sounds like real people talking, only funnier and smarter than real people actually manage.
The premise, if you can even call it that, is just Dante dragged in on his day off to cover a shift at the Quick Stop, then spending the next several hours arguing with customers, clashing with his best mate Randal, agonising over his love life, and losing a battle of attrition against the universe itself. There's no three-act structure here, no tidy resolution, no hero's journey. Just time passing, conversation accumulating, and the quiet existential horror of being young and stuck. It's philosophy in a hockey jersey. Dread behind a counter.
Brian O'Halloran plays Dante as a man held together by complaints, weary and put-upon but oddly compelling as a straight man. But it's Jeff Anderson's Randal who steals the film every time he opens his mouth, delivering his opinions on customers, cinema, and the ethics of the Death Star with the absolute conviction of someone who has given these matters far more thought than they deserve. Their chemistry is the engine of the whole thing, and it never sputters.
Smith never quite topped this, and I say that as someone who has a soft spot for what came after. Mallrats is messier and broader, reaching for a bigger audience and losing some of the scrappy intimacy in the process. Chasing Amy is more ambitious, emotionally riskier, but it's also more uneven. And by the time we get to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and beyond, Smith is deep in his own mythology, making films for fans of films he'd already made. All of it is watchable, some of it genuinely good, but Clerks sits apart from the rest. It's unburdened. It has nothing to prove and no franchise to protect. It's just a funny, angry, clever snapshot of young men treading water, filling the hours with noise because the alternative is silence.
What's remarkable, thirty-odd years on, is how fresh it still feels. The minimum-wage malaise, the gap between where you thought you'd be and where you actually are, the way you can spend an entire day doing nothing and still feel exhausted by it. That stuff doesn't date. The pop-culture rants have a specific early-90s texture to them, sure, but the feeling underneath them is timeless.
It's Kevin Smith at his most honest, most vital, and most purely himself. Four stars, no hesitation.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1994 | Watched: 2025-08-21
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Kevin Smith: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019) · Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) · Mallrats (1995) · Chasing Amy (1997)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
