Men in Black 3D - review

Ten years after their last mission as the anti-alien agents, Will Smith has still got it but Tommy Lee Jones  is getting on - luckily, Josh Brolin steps up as the new sidekick
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25 May 2012

Being the nearest thing in film production to a dead cert, the making of sequels is no mystery. The original Men in Black of 1997 cost $90 million to produce and took $589 million worldwide. In 2002, Men in Black II, which wasn’t quite as good, didn’t do quite so well, grossing $441 million only.

Still, nice work if you can get it. So here, 15 years later, is Men in Black 3, in 3D needless to say. Just about everybody’s turned up for the reunion — Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith star, of course, Barry Sonnenfeld directs again, Spielberg exec-produces, and Rick Baker delivers the alien effects once more. Sadly, Rip Torn doesn’t make it back as the Zed, the head of MIB, this role being taken by non-man Emma Thompson, not great for those of us allergic to her little ways.

But the real loss is Frank the Pug, the caustic little dog, who tells Agent J to kiss his furry little butt and so memorably sings I Will Survive. How could Sonnenfeld have dropped him? How he must have been kicking himself when he saw what Uggie did for The Artist earlier this year. Maybe the original Frank, a mutt called Mushu, has retired? There are ways and means, though, even for talent like this.

The major problem for belated sequels is ageing, never a good look in Hollywood. A few weeks ago, American Pie: Reunion was struggling to bring its teenagers back for a final gross-out at the age of 31. Men in Black has trouble too. Will Smith was in his twenties when he made the first MIB and, at 44, skinny and athletic, he’s still got it. Tommy Lee Jones, on the other hand, was already 50 then and he’s a very saggy 65 now, even for a character as grouchy and pouchy as Agent K. What to do?

Simples. Time travel. Back in 1969, young Agent K saved the world by defeating a nasty piece of work called Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords), shooting off one of his arms, before sending him off to be chained up for ever in Lunar Max. But kinkily dressed, dim-witted Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger lets him out, not that he’s grateful, and Boris heads back to 1969, on the eve of the launch of Apollo 11, to bump off K, get his arm back and allow his ill-natured species to conquer the planet in the future.

One day when J goes into work, K isn’t his partner any more, the world’s about to be engulfed and his only option is to go back in time too, to help the young K.

In a brilliant piece of casting, the young K is played by Josh Brolin, channelling Tommy Lee Jones so well, in speech and demeanour, that he’s almost better than the real thing, as he is now, at any rate.

Brolin, always a formidable physical presence, at least seems voluntarily impassive, whereas TLJ these days looks as if he couldn’t flex those cheeks again if he tried.

So Will Smith, the most reliable grosser in Hollywood, gets a new partner but the same. Bingo. And you’ll know if you liked Men in Black or not in the first place — that particular comedy-thriller pitch (perhaps derived from Ghostbusters?), in which aliens threaten but not too scarily, appearing to be a pretty normal part of life. MIB3 delivers more of the same generously enough, and if, inevitably, it’s not as fresh or inventive as the original, it does that thing of riffing on the old favourites in a way that flatters the audience’s familiarity pretty well.

Young K, in the unreconstructed Sixties, punctuates every line he says to J with a patronising tag — “sport”, “slick”, even “Cochise” and “horse”. Whereas in MIB2, it’s said that just about everybody who works in a post office is an alien, here K says, “I was an agent for three years before I found out all models were aliens.”

There’s some fun with retro-futuristic technology — “that’s a big-ass neuralyzer”, says J, going into one as big as a room — and a great scene in Andy Warhol’s Factory where it’s revealed that Andy is not an alien but a very unhappy agent. “You’ve got to fake my death,” he pleads, “I can’t listen to sitar music any more.”

The 3D adds nothing much, except to the ticket price, again. Where MIB3 goes wrong is in suddenly supplying at the end a soupy origins story for Agent J. Earlier, he’s been explaining that he never knew his dad, he just wasn’t around, a common enough case in African-American men, part of the movie’s target demographic. Then, back in 1969, he sees his father, an all-American hero, sacrifice his life to save the world, and himself as a cute little tot, happening on the scene, asking, “Where’s my daddy? When is he going to be back?” That flips the mood weirdly. Even from such a merchant as Sonnenfeld, it’s startlingly shameless, and cynical too. He should have stuck with Frank the Pug. But maybe Frank’s coming back for a sequel of his own?

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