Third time brings back the charm.
**** out of 5
103 minutes
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, and brief suggestive
content
Columbia
Pictures
Having been off the radar for six years now, I have to say it’s so nice to
see director Barry Sonnenfeld back to his standard brand of wackiness. After
having tried, unsuccessfully, to branch out to more family-friendly fare (“
RV”), and
after supplying simply more of the same with “
Men in Black II,” Sonnenfeld finally
brings us the sequel we should have gotten last time with “
Men in Black III.”
Having dabbled in TV while missing from the big screen, “
MIB³” returns
him back to his more comedically-stylized days of the “
Addams Family”
films and “
Get
Shorty” (although, Sonnenfeld’s work on TV with “
Pushing Daisies” and “
The Tick” certainly
lived up to his level of quirky). There are some hilarious sight gags on
display here.
Admittedly, “
MIB³”
gets off to a rickety start. It is business as usual for Agent J (Will Smith)
and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) as they go about their day flashing their
neuralyzers when a spaceship lands in the streets of Manhattan. Meanwhile, Boris The Animal
(Jemaine Clement) has just escaped a maximum security prison located on the
moon. We also learn that MIB Chief Zed (Rip Torn) has passed on and the MIB is
now under the control of Agent O (Emma Thompson). After a shootout in a Chinese
restaurant, J and K learn about Boris' escape from Lunar-Max and that he has
come to earth to rewrite history. Not though without the help of Jeffrey Price
(Michael Chernus), who has a time-jumping device which sends Boris back to 1969
where he kills K leaving only J with his memories from the last 14 years.
At first no one believes J and thinks he’s suffering from an
extraterrestrial tick bite. But his thirst for chocolate milk and frequent
headaches clue O into what’s really going on. J is suffering from a
"temporal fracture," meaning someone has altered reality. Now J must
also pay a visit to Jeffrey to get himself back to 1969 to track down Boris
before he can kill K and prevent him from initiating a defense device given to
him by a “pre-cog” of sorts named Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg). Boris wants
revenge on K for shooting his arm off and also wants to destroy earth in the
present day, stopping K from deploying the defense device. And so begins a game
of cat and mouse for J and Young Agent K (film stealing Josh Brolin), with the
help of Young Agent O (Alice Eve), leading up to an event in Cape Canaveral
that must happen in order to prevent Boris and his army of originally extinct Boglodites
from taking out the present.
The main complaint surrounding “
MIB2” was its lack of plot, but that’s
totally made up for here. Yes, there are aliens among us, and it definitely
sounds more confusing upon trying to write that synopsis — there’s far more to
the story than anyone would have guessed. While it has been made very public
that the production was working without a complete script (final screenplay
credit is given to Etan Cohen, “
Tropic Thunder” and frequent Mike Judge collaborator), they
clearly had a story in mind. Thankfully, “
MIB³” does what a successful sequel
should do: bring a comfortable amount of familiarity to the proceedings while
still adding to what’s happened before. Granted, none of the plot points here
were hinted at in the first two films, but at least now you may look back at
the original with an inkling of new meaning. “
Men in Black 3” squeaks by the original
and makes me more than happy to see the franchise return.
Photos courtesy Columbia Pictures
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