They are back… in time.
At the request of virtually no one besides Will Smith’s accountant, the once-robust Men in Black film franchise returns to cinemas after a 10-year absence with this third installment. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are both back as the necessarily anonymous Agents J and K, respectively, as are director Barry Sonnenfeld and the original movie’s screenwriter, David Koepp (Spider-Man). The cumulative effect is one of old friends getting together, reminiscing about the good times and doing their best to ignore the wrinkles and groans that betray their age.
The second Men in Black has generally been dismissed as a diminished copy of the original, a curious perception of a movie and a franchise that has been built more on the chemistry of its leads and the novelty of its premise, a global agency that serves as immigration processing for aliens – the outer space kind – and polices those already on Earth living among an unwitting human population. Plot has always been secondary here, a half-dismissed engine for J and K to trade barbs and react to the kooky aliens they meet in the course of their investigations. Where the second film coasted on pure charm, to the dissatisfaction of some, this third installment attempts to re-inject some humanity to the alien capers.
Trading on that time-honored trope of time travel – the science fiction sequel equivalent of taking its characters to Japan – Men in Black III finds alien assassin Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement of “Flight of the Conchords”) busting out of his high-security prison cell with a plan to get back at the man who put him there 40 years earlier, Agent K. Rather than hunt K down in the present (there’s a missing limb involved, and he’d prefer to avoid that), Boris jaunts back in time with a notion to kill K back in 1969, when it all went south for the bug-eyed assassin.
It spoils nothing to say he succeeds, and J is the only one who remembers K existed in the original, unaltered timeline. Unfortunately for Earth, K’s continued existence was actually a matter of vital planetary security, and Boris’s actions in the past lead to catastrophic events in the present. In a desperate bid to save his partner and the Earth, J arranges his own time travel (it’s both harder and easier than you think) and shunts back to July 1969, the fateful day he knows he must save K in order to restore the proper timeline and save present-day Earth. To do so, he teams up with the younger version of K (No Country for Old Men’s Josh Brolin, doing an eerie Jones impression) and encounters a bevy of 1960s New York signifiers (including Andy Warhol, racist cops, and “Mad Men”-style fashions and gender relations) on his way to preventing the imminent disaster.
Geniality has never been in short supply in the Men in Black movies, and this installment plugs along so joyously it’s hard to fault how deeply unnecessary it all is. Smith and Jones play the same characters they’ve played most of their careers but with sunglasses on, and the results are unsurprising but great fun to watch. Much like II there is a perfunctory romantic subplot, this time with K and his unrequited crush, new boss O, played by Emma Thompson in the present and Alice Eve (She’s Out of Your League) in the past. Neither their chaste romance nor J’s abandonment issues are given much attention beyond their usefulness to the plot, and the result is a predictable finale set piece that checks off all the boxes of rudimentary action and pathos.
Until then, though, Men in Black III, like its predecessors, gleefully chugs along with enough infectious insanity to entertain without the aggression of Transformers or the hollowness of… okay, I’ll go with Transformers again. The movie won’t be mistaken for profound any time soon, but inspired moments like a clairvoyant alien (A Serious Man’s Michael Stuhlbarg) linking the “Miracle Mets” to the randomness of life’s decisions keep the audience’s smirk-to-thrill ratio in balance with the movie’s action scenes (done no favors in 3D, by the way). Men in Black III, like the earlier installments, gets by on whimsy, but this time the foundations feel a bit firmer. Smith, Jones, Sonnenfeld and Koepp cover their gaffes and missteps with the confidence that they still know what they’re doing. It’s quintessential summer blockbuster fare: breezy, engaging for the 90 minutes you’re in the theatre, and surprisingly not insulting to your intelligence, unlike… I’ll just go with Transformers one last time here. As a franchise-extending money-grab, it may be unnecessary, but it’s still a good time after all these years.
Rating: 2.5 Stars
Film: Men in Black III
Starring: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Emma Thompson, and Michael Stuhlbarg
Directed By: Barry Sonnenfeld
Written By: David Koepp, Etan Cohen, Jeff Nathanson, and Michael Soccio
Based On: the Malibu comic by Lowell Cunningham
