When the first Men in Black movie came out in 1997, alien lifeforms and secret government organizations were all the rage. The X-Files was one of the most popular shows on TV, there were reports of nefarious black helicopters flying over U.S. towns, and kids were putting alien head decals on their skate boards all across the globe. It was pretty much the perfect time to release a movie about a shadowy government agency who regulates intergalactic threats. And seeing as Independence Day had made a bunch of money and made Will Smith a big star just a year before, going back to the Fresh Prince vs. Marvin the Martian well one more time seemed like a no-brainer. But fifteen years later, maybe a decade since the last time I’ve seen anyone put an alien sticker on anything or talk about a government conspiracy... I just don’t think that anybody was asking for another Men in Black sequel. And now that budding young superstar Will Smith is old enough to have famous kids of his own, well, Men in Black III kind of feels like your grandpa’s summer blockbuster.
Never the less, it’s been released, and this time around the story involves a deadly alien named Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) who shares some painful memories with Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent K. You see, way back in the 60s K blew Boris’ arm off, foiled all of his invasion plans, and had him jailed in a lunar prison. Things like that tend to make a guy hold a grudge, even if he’s from another planet, so now that Boris has escaped from prison and acquired a time travel device there’s going to be hell to pay. One jump back in time and an offscreen murder later and suddenly Agent J (Will Smith) wakes up in a world where his partner has been dead for decades and the Earth is being destroyed by Boris’ people’s invading forces. It then becomes J’s job to travel back in time, stop the time traveling Boris from killing young K, and set everything back the way it was. There might have also been something in there about a book called the ‘Gray’s Sports Almanac,’ unless I stopped paying attention and am getting this movie confused with something else.
The biggest problem with Men in Black III as a whole, aside from the fact that another Men in Black sequel seems unwanted and unnecessary, is that the story is dumb and it gets presented without serious stakes or any emotional heft. Early on in the film the Earth is being invaded and actively destroyed, and everyone on screen meets the development with yawns and shrugged shoulders. When Smith’s character brings up the fact that he might be able to stop it all by finding a time machine and killing an alien on the day of the first moon launch, his boss is basically like, “Sure, whatever. Give it a try. See you later.” Then all of the time travel stuff starts.
Sure, time travel plots are always a tangled web that get their writers in a sticky situation or two—most of the time there’s at least one development that doesn’t make much sense under scrutiny—but there isn’t a single moment in Men in Black III that makes a lick of sense, no matter how hard you try to actively push any intelligent thought out of your head. There are plot holes that you could march an army of invading aliens through, inconsistencies so glaring that they at first seem like they must be intentional and important, and paradoxes that get explained away with nonsensical, throwaway exposition involving chocolate milk. It’s a very bad thing to have to make an effort to dumb yourself down in order to make a story work. If you’ve given it your best shot and you’re still questioning why nothing makes sense, then probably you’re watching a movie that just shouldn’t have been made.
The performances here are kind of a mixed bag. Jemaine Clement plays the bad guy with an unfettered wackiness that robs everything he does of any danger. He’s got silly teeth, he’s given wacky lines, he preens and postures, and somehow we’re supposed to treat the notion of his people coming to the Earth as dire and dangerous. Why? Because he can shoot spikes out of his wrist? Terrifying. Not even the protagonists buy it, as they trash talk and humiliate Boris the Animal throughout the entire film. So why should I care about anything he does? The script needed to take the character more seriously, and Clement needed to add some more menace into his performance, because right now the story told plays as an insignificant lark.
On the other hand, you have Will Smith as the protagonist, and he proves that he’s still the most valuable asset at this franchise’s disposal. Through sheer force of charisma he makes it through this movie unscathed. He takes pedestrian material and elevates it to being at least amusing. Every time a joke delivered by someone else fails, Smith manages to deliver a zinger that kind of works in spite of itself. He keeps the film from going off the rails entirely. He’s like cinematic teflon; while everyone else gets bogged down by the shoddy material they’re working with, he just slides through it, coasting on his persona and somehow making it all work.
Tommy Lee Jones seems to be similarly coasting as K, but he doesn’t have the charisma to get away with it. He just looks like he doesn’t really want to be making this movie, and, to be honest, it was kind of a relief to get his scowl off the screen and have him replaced by another actor once his character got killed off; especially because Josh Brolin stepped in as Young K and proved to be the most appealing part of the production. Brolin has his Tommy Lee Jones impression down to a T, and it’s absolutely entrancing and entertaining to watch him live in the man’s skin. He sounds like him, he moves like him, and he even starts to look like him after a while. Unfortunately, while Brolin was by far the saving grace of the film, watching him play the K character can only go so far. It was sketch comedy good—fun for a few minutes and then it’s time to try and find an out. Five minutes of watching Brolin make fun of/pay tribute to Tommy Lee Jones on Saturday Night Live would have been viral gold. Here it seems to be the entire reason this movie was made, and I’m not so certain the juice was worth the squeeze in this case. Which is how I would describe Men in Black III overall: not worth the effort that went into making it. The script has an end scene in mind, but it doesn’t care how sloppy it is in getting there. The action is all generic and non-threatening. The humor fails far more often than it succeeds. And the special effects largely look like they’re from a movie that came out ten or fifteen years ago. To watch Men in Black III you would think that filmmaking technology hadn’t progressed at all since the first Men in Black.
Except for the obviously digital cinematography. If, for whatever reason, you end up watching this one, look at Tommy Lee Jones’ eyes. Look how human they look, behind the layer of makeup and digital imaging that makes his face look completely fake. Movies like The Social Network have shown that it’s possible to make digital filmmaking look beautiful, but that certainly isn’t the case here. The actors in this movie look like they’re made of plastic, to an Uncanny Valley approaching degree.
Soon real actors and digital characters are going to be completely indiscernible from one another, but it’s not going to be because special effects have advanced so far, it’s going to be because image quality has degraded so much and humans have gotten progressively more fake. Men in Black III points to a scary future of shoddy, thrown together films that get made solely because someone has a property they want to further exploit. Sloppy script, disinterested actors, hurried effects work... who cares? Men in Black is a franchise that guarantees us a certain level of ticket sales! Modern filmmaking technology is making it far easier for anyone to quickly churn out a movie, even a summer blockbuster type movie. That may be good news in regards to the work from struggling artists we’ll get to watch that we wouldn’t have otherwise, but put all of this cheap and easy tech in the hands of greedy studio executives, and something wicked this way comes.
