Clerks critics be damned – Kevin Smith has made Hollywood a better place

Silent Bob has received one of the year’s loudest raspberries. Having reinvented himself as podcaster, raconteur and bête noire of Harvey Weinstein director Kevin Smith has now gone back to where it all started with a new Clerks movie – the imaginatively titled Clerks III. Silent Bob – Smith’s onscreen alias with the regulation backwards baseball cap – rides again.

So far, the journey is proving bumpy. Clerks III, which follows the 1994 original and Clerks II from 2006, has suffered a critical trouncing. “For diehards only,” said the Washington Post of the movie, which is released Friday, September 16. “A closed loop only for die-hards,” echoed the Los Angeles Times. “Dispiriting,” sighed the AV Club.

Rotten reviews won’t detain Smith (52). If Clerks – a lo-fi, black and white chronicling of a day in the life of two slackers working at a convenience store – was instantly acclaimed, the rest of his career has been one big thumbs down.

Cop Out, the 2010 action-comedy he made with Bruce Willis, was lamented by Time Out as “oozing desperation from every frame”. His 2016 comedy Yoga Hosers – starring Johnny Depp’s daughter Lily-Rose – was described by movie review site Rotten Tomatoes as “undisciplined, unfunny, and bereft of evident purpose”. He’s also been accused of misogyny over 1997’s Chasing Amy, in which Ben Affleck flips out over his girlfriend’s complicated romantic history (the film suggests he is justified in doing so).

It isn’t just the critics. Willis notoriously lost his cool with Smith on the set of Cop Out when he advised the director to use a specific camera lens for a close-up. He discovered that Smith knew nothing about lenses (Willis next threatened to punch Smith). If Clerks represented a brief moment of acclaim, with Smith heralded as a contemporary of Richard Linklater and Quentin Tarantino, it’s been all downhill ever since.

And yet, even with Clerks III set to deliver another ding to his reputation, nobody would describe Smith as a failure. Least of all Smith himself. As he was rushed to hospital having suffered a massive heart attack while speaking on stage in 2018, one of the things that kept him calm was knowing he’d achieved more than he would ever have imagined possible growing up in New Jersey. How is it, then, that someone who has objectively squandered the kudos he gained with Clerks should nonetheless look, to all the world, like a glowing success?

The answer is simple. Smith understands the limits of his talents and doesn't seem all that bothered that he is orbiting ever-decreasing whirlpools of mediocrity. “I’ve been living on that one trick for a long time,” he has said of Clerks. “Like, come on, that movie was cute – but 25 years on the back of one black-and-white movie?”

If Smith doesn’t appear particularly interested in making films of substance, perhaps it is because he has used his directing career as a stepping stone to his true passion – which is celebrating geek culture. In this, he was way out front.

In the Nineties, when Smith started talking about his love of X-Men and Luke Skywalker, nerdom still carried a heavy reek of tragedy. Confessing to a fondness for Star Wars or Star Trek – or having strong opinions as to which was superior – was tantamount to telling the world you were a 40-year-old virgin who lived with your parents.

Smith was one of the first public figures to “out” themselves as a fanboy. In Clerks, the characters debate whether the construction workers who helped build the superior Death Star in Return of the Jedi deserved to be blown up by the Rebel Alliance. In public, Smith enthused about Marvel, Darth Vader and his love for obscure comic books (going so far as to write a script for Tim Burton’s aborted Superman Lives project).

Three years ago in even played himself in the Big Bang Theory, participating in a game of Dungeons and Dragons alongside William Shatner, Joe Manganiello [a celebrity D&D fan], Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Will Wheaton. This is, was and forever shall be “peak geek”.

He has flourished, meanwhile, as a public speaker and podcaster. Smith has made sold-out appearances at Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall and in 2005 hosted a seven-hour q&a session at the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey. And he runs a comic book store, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, again in New Jersey. Here, he records his podcasts I Sell Comics and SModcast (he is the “S” – the “M” is his producer partner Scott Mosier).

Smith was also one of the few in Hollywood to stand up to a pre-cancelled Harvey Weinstein. Clerks was distributed by Weinstein’s Miramax corporation, leading Smith to spend much of the 1990s as a creature of Weinstein's – to be moulded according to the producer’s whims.

But where everyone else bowed and scraped before Weinstein, Smith eventually grew tired of his weaponised boorishness. He says he was unaware Weinstein was a sexual predator ( “All I knew was that he was a philanderer, he cheated on his wife”). However, he did what nobody else – not even Brad Pitt or Tarantino – dared by getting into a screaming match with the producer.

The occasion was a screening at the Sundance Film Festival of Smith’s 2011 action movie Red State (it was at Sundance that Clerks had first wowed critics). Weinstein had exited the premiere to take a call. “And then commenced speaking so loudly he could be heard inside the cinema. It disgusted me so much,” said Smith. “It doesn’t get much more heartbreaking. So I f______’ lost it, and I went out and said, “Hey. Shut the f___ up!” And he looked at me with f______ hate in his eyes. And I said, “Yeah. That’s me and I’m saying it.” And he just left.”

Weinstein would call Smith in a panic several years later, suggesting they collaborate on a sequel to 1999’s Dogma. It was late 2017, two weeks before a New York Times report alleged the producer had used his status to prey on women. “He was circling his wagons,” Smith said. “I am not a victim here. But I felt used a little bit.”

In the years since Hollywood has been rattled by the sound of many skeletons tumbling out of many closets. Smith, though, has always been one of the good guys. He admitted that he was wrong in framing Chasing Amy – about a man who dates a bisexual woman – from the perspective of the guy. Today, such a film would be from the women’s perspective he has said. The story is hers. And he was one of the vocal critics of Warner Bros’s shock cancellation of its Batgirl spin-off.

“It’s an incredibly bad look to cancel the Latina Batgirl movie [star Leslie Grace is of Dominican heritage]. I don’t give a s___ if the movie was absolute fucking dogs___ – I guarantee you that it wasn’t. The two directors who directed that movie did a couple of episodes of Ms Marvel, and it was a wonderful f______ show and they had more money to do Batgirl than they had to do an episode of Ms Marvel and stuff.”

All that and we have him to thank, in a small way, for the eternal circus that was and ever shall be the Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez romance. Though the couple met shooting Gigli in 2002, their relationship entered its flashbulb-popping prime around the time they starred in Smith’s Jersey Girl in 2004.

So he can claim some credit for the tabloid Godzilla that was Bennifer. Plus he has written multiple Marvel comic strips and in 2021 rebooted He-Man and the Masters of the Universe for Netflix. With all that to his credit, little wonder he doesn’t seem bothered by the jeering directed at Clerks III. His movies are rickety and sometimes hard to watch. But the Kevin Smith expanded universe is so much bigger and, for his many fans around the world, there is no better place to hang out.