Thursday, July 5, 2012

Movie Review: "Men In Black 3"

I saw this movie last week but with all the madness of the storm and no power, I never had the time to write a review.

Agents J and K are back in what I'm guessing is the last movie in the Men in Black series. (It's 15 years after the first one was released and 10 years after the sequel, but then again, I would never have believed Harrison Ford would have done a fourth Indiana Jones movie, so who knows what will happen when money's involved?)

Deranged and deadly criminal Boris the Animal (Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement) has escaped from his maximum security lunar prison, vowing revenge on Agent K (a taciturn Tommy Lee Jones), who put him there back in 1969. The problem: Boris has gotten his hands on a time travel device which would allow him to change the course of time and wipe out Agent K before he captures him.

Meanwhile, K and J (Will Smith) are fighting because Agent K is acting more and more like a father to J and less like a partner. And then one morning, J wakes up to find that K is not only missing...but every trace of him from the last 40 years has been wiped away, because the temporal framework has been tampered with. Oh, and Boris has allowed a race of aliens to invade Earth. So J travels back in time to 1969 to help a younger K (now played by Josh Brolin) right the course of history...but he finds a lot more than he bargained for.

This was a fun movie, with new aliens and a lot of the same gimmicks as the others in the franchise. It seemed like it took a little time to get going (more than I remember being the case with the earlier movies). Josh Brolin captures Tommy Lee Jones' mannerisms and voice completely, which kept the movie from being formulaic, and it packs a bit of an emotional (and surprising) punch that I really didn't expect.

Does Men in Black 3 break any new ground? No. But it is good fun, so if you were a fan of the earlier movies in the franchise, it ties things up nicely. Don't spend the money on the 3D version, however.

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