Cinema: Trust no one

Kevin Smith's sequel to the 1994 slacker hit Clerks pulls too many punches, while feminist rom-com Trust the Man hits out at every man in sight. By Declan Burke

To paraphrase HL Mencken ever so slightly, nobody ever went broke underestimating a woman's capacity for believing the worst of a man. The underlying message of Trust The Man (16s) is that guys are basically big kids. You can't leave them alone for very long or they'll burn themselves / stick marbles up their noses / wind up having marriage-destroying affairs. Tom (David Duchovny) has given up his job to be a stay-at-home father while wife Rebecca (Julianne Moore) earns a substantial crust as an actress. Given Rebecca's unwillingness to have sex with him, it's inevitable that the internet porn-addict will eventually start looking elsewhere for physical fulfilment. Meanwhile, Rebecca's brother Tobey (Billy Crudup) is in arrested development, and shies away from committing to long-term girlfriend Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal) on the basis that marriage a pointless exercise, since we're all doomed to die anyway.

The phrase 'feminist Woody Allen-lite romantic comedy' should be enough to strike fear into the heart of any self-respecting cinema-goer, but Trust The Man is an enjoyable, if outrageously contrived, piece of hokum. The humour is droll, understated and piercingly effective, and the characters – in what is, in effect, a four-hander ensemble piece – fit well together. Even David Duchovny, previously a rather wooden presence on the big screen, seems entirely comfortable in these surroundings.

There's a gritty realism to writer / director Bart Freundlich's tale that makes for pleasingly incongruous moments – the soar-away passion of an illicit affair, for example, is punctured by a child's untimely and innocent spilling of the beans – and for the most part, Trust The Man succeeds in treading the fine line between fantasy and reality.

It's not all about man-bashing, either. It is certainly a woman's-eye view of the battle of the sexes and the men get their fair share of zingers, but they are afforded a modicum of redemption at the end. Unfortunately, when the big romantic finale does arrive, it's so clichéd and hysterically melodramatic that it undermines all the good work that has gone before.

Clerks II (16s) does manage to sustain its down-beat tone all the way through, although that's not necessarily a good thing. Kevin Smith scored a cult hit with Clerks back in 1994, a tale of wage-slaves whiling away the hours by rambling incoherently about pop culture. It struck a chord with an audience similarly immersed in issues such as (to take some examples from the sequel) debating the merits of Lord of the Rings versus Star Wars; inappropriate sexual positions; and the whole 'Porch Monkey racial slur' thing. Pointless, childish and at times boringly repetitive, the overall effect of the dialogue-driven story is actually quite funny. Smith, who writes and directs, has a good ear for his target audience's argot, and understands that he's in the business of pop culture satire. Unfortunately, he can't alienate his audience by poking too much fun at it; as a result, Clerks II tends to bark where it really should be biting.

Trust The Man ***

Clerks II ***