Wow, hard to imagine ten years ago I was sitting in a theater ready to throw my popcorn at the screen. But it was true. Ten years ago Men in Black 2: Electric Boogaloo was released and it was, well, crap. I mean, compared to Wild Wild West, it wasn’t horrible, but it was just, not good. I could go into reasons of its suckage, but I think for the sake of all those involved, I’ll just skip it.
Cut to ten years later and we receive word that there will be a third Men In Black movie. Really? After ten years? I mean, I’ve heard of sequels taking awhile to be made, but this was kind of overkill. It was also being released in May, something I haven’t seen for a Will Smith movie. Though I could understand not releasing on July 4th, due to the whole, ya know, Spider Man thing being released that same weekend.
Going into the film was sort of like going to see the doctor. You know its not going to be good, he’s going to give you shit about losing weight and you’ll cry, but you have to do it. It felt more like an obligation for me as a Will Smith fan to see this film. Lord knows I wasn’t going to run out and see the movies his kids were in, or listen to their music. I may be loyal to the guy, but I’m not that loyal.
So I went and it was… okay. Let me make something clear, if we’re comparing this to the second one, its friggin Shakespeare. It does what the second one didn’t. The story was about Agent J and K. There was no love interest, the dumb little aliens got dropped back to cameo status, the damn pug was not in it, save two shots of his ugly mug, and the product placement was lowered a few notches.
Unfortunately, this movie is also coming out the same month as a certain other movie was being released, so admittedly Mr. Smith and crew were going to get kind of lost in the shuffle.
Lets start out with the basic plot, and no spoilers here my friends. The basic premise is that an alien escapes from jail and plans to kill the man that put him there, in this case, Agent K. But he goes one step beyond the normal “SMASH TIL EVERYONE DEAD RARG!!!” and decides to go back to time and kill Kay and fuck up the future in the process. I have to give this villain credit, he’s slightly more creative than your average.
So Agent J, whose the only one who knows that K was supposed to make it to the 21st century, goes back in time and attempts to rescue his buddy.
I’ll start out with the good of this movie. Will Smith has cranked his Will Smithness up to 11 and manages a really good performance, easily stepping back into the shoes of agent J. He’s still snarky, he’s still rude, but there’s a genuine kindness there. He also manages to hit all the good emotional turns well.
Then there’s Josh Brolin who takes on the role of young(ish) Agent K. I’m not this guy’s number one fan, but he does a real good impression of Tommy Lee Jones and I give him credit for having a pretty tough role playing an established character.
Tommy Lee Jones does a pretty good job, for the few scenes he was in. One scene that really struck me is the scene where he calls J out of the blue and starts to get emotional.
The 1960’s part of the movie looked really nice and detailed pretty well. And this is of course another movie to have historical moments helped by supernatural forces.
The story itself is pretty silly, but its Men In Black, so it doesn’t come out of left field or anything.
But with all good things, I gotta talk about the bad, and there was a little. First off, the CGI in this movie is a freaking joke. I mean, if they were purposely going for that cartooney, this-looks-worse-than-most-15-dollar-videogames, then they succeeded. Some of it looked pretty okay, but man, the human CGI was particularly jarring.
My other major complaint is the villain himself. He’s pretty damn forgettable as far as villains go, although he looked pretty cool. Yeah, I don’t even remember the guys name. At a certain point in the film, you know the villain is pretty much toast, and with that, a lot of the major tension leaves the film rather quickly.
Overall, this was better than I suspected, but with a summer filled with Avengers, Spiderman, Batman this film is more than likely going to get swept under the rug pretty quickly.
Final Score: 3 Dancing Chickens out of 5.
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