Movie Review - ‘Men in Black 3’

By Bob Garver

“Men in Black 3” is one of those third films that doesn’t quite cap­ture the magic of the first film but isn’t as dis­as­trous as the sec­ond. I find that this is often the case with fran­chises with three or more films. My the­ory is that it has to do with expec­ta­tions. The first film is of course going to be well-received hence the need for sequels. Then along comes the sec­ond film where the expec­ta­tion is for repeated suc­cess or even improve­ment with the win­ning for­mula. Unfor­tu­nately, many sec­ond films are lame cash-ins not made with the same pas­sion. When a third film is made, the expec­ta­tion is for the film to be another dis­ap­point­ment. With expec­ta­tions so low, it’s not hard for the third film to exceed them. It’s why I’ve treated the third install­ments of “The Matrix” and “Juras­sic Park” with such kind­ness. And it’s why I just can’t get too mad at “Men in Black 3”.

Agents J (Will Smith) and K (Tommy Lee Jones) are back, still keep­ing tabs on alien life on Earth. Their act hasn’t changed much; K is as always the griz­zled vet­eran, J the brash hot­shot. J will say some­thing about K being anti­so­cial, K will say some­thing about J being fool­ish and so on. By now they’ve learned to tol­er­ate each other and actu­ally have good chem­istry as part­ners. The film’s early scenes are wel­come if not a bit overly familiar.

The part­ner­ship is tested when they face an unprece­dented prob­lem. An evil alien called Boris the Ani­mal (Jemaine Clement) has bro­ken out of his moon prison and wants revenge on K, who locked him up over forty years ago. But it’s not enough for him to go after K now, he goes back in time to stop K from arrest­ing him and sub­se­quently invent­ing a device that saves Earth from anni­hi­la­tion. When J goes to work in the morn­ing he learns that K has been dead for decades and Boris and his planet are lay­ing waste to Earth. To save the world he’ll have to go back in time himself.

In the past, J finds him­self work­ing with a younger K (Josh Brolin). Smith and Brolin have chem­istry just as good as Smith and Jones and Brolin does a creep­ily spot-on impres­sion of a young K. Bill Hader (yay!) plays Andy Warhol, sur­pris­ingly an under­cover Men in Black agent as opposed to an alien. Emma Thomp­son and Alice Eve play two ver­sions of an agent with a roman­tic his­tory with K. But my favorite new char­ac­ter is Michael Stuhlbarg as Grif­fin, an alien who can see into the future. The catch is that he can see mul­ti­ple ver­sions of the future based on minor vari­ables. His emo­tions run high and low because of all the very real­is­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties. He’s mostly anx­ious, but also agree­ably curious.

The film has taken some crit­i­cism for plot holes involv­ing its ele­ments of time travel. I know I’m usu­ally one to com­plain about omis­sions, incon­sis­ten­cies, and flat-out wrong­ness, but not here. I’m not going to get bent out of shape if this action com­edy with space aliens doesn’t nail all the details of a fic­tional science.

Even with their out-of-this-world work, J and K pretty much have a rou­tine down at this point. Appro­pri­ate, since “Men in Black 3” seems pretty rou­tine. The jokes are funny but expected. What makes the film stand out are the new char­ac­ters, espe­cially Stuhlbarg’s clair­voy­ant and the vil­lain played by Jemaine Clement (who also gave a good vil­lain­ous per­for­mance last year voic­ing the evil cock­a­too in the ani­mated com­edy “Rio”). It’s a pretty decent film that does a ser­vice to the “Men in Black” fran­chise, espe­cially since the sec­ond film was such a bomb. See­ing as it is such a ser­vice­able third film, I feel it’s only right to give i…

Three Stars out of Five.

“Men in Black 3” is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action vio­lence and brief sug­ges­tive con­tent. Its run­ning time is 106 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at HYPERLINK “mailto:rrg251@nyu.edu” rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on May 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.