In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I am a Kevin Smith fan. A rabid one. I love everything he has ever done. Be they his five (now six) movies taking place in the viewaskewniverse (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), his attempt at something more adult (Jersey Girl), or just listening to him talk (An Evening with Kevin Smith). Hell, I even love all of his appearances on Jay Leno with his Roadside Attraction bits he’s been known to do. So, going into this movie, I was already biased towards liking it. But I didn’t expect what I actually got out of it. And that is one of Smith’s best movies yet.

After making Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Kevin Smith said that he would never be making another movie with the characters again. But he apparently made a promise to help friend and costar Jason Mewes (Jay). He told Mewes that if Mewes quit drugs and went to rehab, he would make another movie with the characters. Smith was later quoted saying, “I just never thought he would actually do it.” At this time Smith had also been working on the special features for the new Clerks X special edition DVD. He has said that while revisiting the characters in Clerks, he fell in love with them all over again, and had this urge to continue their story.

Whatever the reasons, we can be glad they happened, because Smith held nothing back for this part dumb comedy, part touching story that I honestly didn’t know Smith had in him. The movie was originally going to be called Clerks II: The Passion of the Clerks, but the subtitle was dropped. Which is a good thing, because I don't think Kevin Smith really wanted to piss off the Catholic League...again. (Or a drunk Mel Gibson.)

The movie opens ten years after the first movie with the destruction of the QuikStop. After the livelihood of Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randall (Jeff Anderson) burns down, they are forced to find new jobs, and find them at Mooby’s, a McDonald’s type restaurant. The new setting doesn’t stop them from being the same lazy, crass, pop-culture obsessed slackers that they were at the QuikStop. Here they are joined by two new characters: Becky (played beautifully by Rosario Dawson) and Elias (Trevor Fehrman, who is surprisingly funny here).

Following them to Mooby’s are, of course, Jay and Silent Bob. Jason Mewes plays Jay better here than I think he ever has. In the last couple of movies, Jay has seemed almost cartoonish in the things he says and does. Here he is back to being the Jay he was originally intended to be, a drug dealer hanging out in front of a shop selling to anyone who has the money. He and Smith as Silent Bob have some of the funniest moments in the movie. Their characters have found Jesus and given up using drugs. Of course, that won't stop them from selling them. From impromtu dance scenes to a shocking homage to Buffalo Bill from Silence of the lambs, they are both in rare form here.

We meet up with Dante on his last day at Mooby’s. He is engaged to Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach, Smith’s real-life wife) and they are about to move to Florida the following day. Gone are Dante’s two love interests from the first one because, as I see it, these guys are so in denial about aging that the girls have to get younger as they get older. Dante is leaving New Jersey behind and is going to settle down working at Emma’s father’s car wash.

Smith uses this setting to tell a story about doing the right thing, doing the responsible thing, growing up, leaving your friends behind, and, by the end, doing what you have to do in order to be happy with yourself.

I’m giving this movie 5 MegaMoobyMuffins out of 5. Yes, this movie is mostly stoner comedy, and is at some points down right disgusting (interspecies erotica for example). But it is also a movie that actually has a meaning, and that was more than I was expected out of it. And oh yeah, it’s damn funny.