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This is a note-for-note cover of its predecessor, 1994's Clerks, the charmingly crude black-and-white heap upon which writer-director Kevin Smith built his frustratingly uneven career as a maker of cult favorites about average people leading below-average lives. If the footage weren't in color and if the actors reprising their roles were a little thinner, you'd swear this was cobbled together from outtakes of the last one. But Smith acolytes would insist that is the point: Here we are, a decade later, and nothing has changed for Dante Hicks (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson). They're still go-nowhere men, moved offsite only by the inferno that devours the Quick Stop where Dante works. After the depressing middlebrow sitcom that was Jersey Girl, Smith had little choice but to go back to the Quick Stop, and he found out what everyone else discovers when they retreat to old haunts: You can go home again, but the place probably oughta be burned to the ground.

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