Men in Black 3 Review
If someone has a functioning neuralizer please use it to erase the last 103 minutes from my memory.
I quick survey of other reviewers has revealed that about 70% of them think this film is a rollicking roller coaster through the magical land of comedy and the other 30% regret all the dinosaurs who had to die in order to make the film this movie was shot on. I, unfortunately, am in the 30% for one major reason: this movie is freaking stupid.
It always amazes me when a movie with the budget of a small countries GNP ($350 million) to have the very best in very expensive actors and special effects can’t seem to find $50 to hire a decent story writer. Will Smith has done some stupid movies in his career (Independence Day, Wild, Wild West, I am Legend) but this one really breaks new ground. The stupidity oozes from every pore and orifice, causing other weeping sores and lesions to develop that also ooze stupidity. It’s like of some stupid scientists were doing stupid research into the fundamental nature of stupidity and working on the Unified Field Theory of Stupidity only to discover a new stupid element (Stupidium), which they injected into their brains before writing a movie script.
All that being said, I cannot say this movie was really bad per se. The humor was strong, the special effects both puppets and CGI were good, and a lot of the supporting actors did a decent job. However the catch phrase “stupidly entertaining” is one that I feel is bandied around too much these days. Is it that difficult or bad to be “intelligently entertaining”? I actually consider this trend towards stupid movie scripts to be less about the writers being stupid or incompetent (although that is a possibility) and more about the absolute contempt that Hollywood currently has for the intellectual ability of the American movie audience, and as a member of that audience I am (and most of you should be) a little incensed. They are clearly writing stories for eight year olds and foreign markets and leaving those of us with a couple brain cells to die on the vine. (the Brawndo image, incidentally, is from Idiocracy and I think appropriate given that the mental decline of the human race is only being accelerated by movies of this stripe. The image comes courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category)
The violence and sex was deeply embedded in the PG-13 trench, with a lot of aliens exploding into kid friendly piles of goo rather than traumatizing alien corpses. The guy they got to play young Agent K (Josh Brolin-the Goonies, Wall Street Money Never Sleeps, No Country for Old Men) was amazing. He obviously studied not only the character but the Tommy Lee Jones mannerisms and gestures. In fact, he was much more Agent K in my mind by the end of the movie than Tommy Lee Jones, who seemed kind of tired through most of this (and really had limited screen time). The villain Boris the Animal (think Bug from the first MIB mixed with Lobo) was entertaining and disgusting. However, a big part of the appeal of the first film (we won’t talk about MIB2 in this review) was the aliens and how they could easily appear anywhere. Any human or animal on the street could potentially be another cool, weird alien. In this film they more or less ignored that all together and actually kept the aliens to a minimum. Instead they had a lot of humans (Andy Warhol, for example, could have been a really funny alien but instead is an undercover MIB agent. By the way, as a fan of Andy Warhol who sees him as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century I was kind of put off by his portrayal here) and human looking aliens. There was the obligatory walk through the MIB lobby with a ton of them and the inevitable disgusting fight scene against a giant slobbery fish, but other than that even the aliens that were part of the story always looked mostly human. I feel dirty for saying this as I normally hate this sort of thing, but this movie really could have used a small alien comic relief sidekick.
Anyway, the story. A few spoilers incoming, so if you really feel you will lose something from the story by know ahead of time what will happen skip ahead, but take it from me you probably won’t. I have seen scripts chock full of plot holes, but never on this scale. It’s like the first few massive plot holes started breeding smaller plot holes, who also started breeding with each other resulting in a massive six generation clan of inbred gaping plot holes. Boris the Animal is some kind of alien sociopathic killer from a now extinct race of aliens (did I mention that they borrowed heavily from Lobo on this one?) who has a crawfish living in his palm and can shoot spikes at people. He escapes from a prison on the moon staffed by the stupidest humans in the universe with the help of a super hot girl (don’t worry, this is the one and only time you will see anything remotely attractive and female in the entirety of the film) and his personal mud bug. He gets back to Earth, steals a time machine, and goes back in time to kill K (Tommy Lee Jones). He appears to succeed and K disappears from the time line, except for some reason J (Will Smith) can remember him (this was the first truly massive plot hole. There were any number of small to medium “practice” plot holes (how is it no one questions a human girl with a big cake visiting an alien in a prison that no humans are even supposed to know about, why would any prison on the moon have a armory 10 feet from the prisoners complete with weapons capable of blowing a massive hole to the vacuum, how does Boris the Animal talk when standing outside on the moon’s surface with no atmosphere, etc.) but this was the first one (of several) that felt like I was having a brain aneurism). J’s constant craving of chocolate milk was recognized by O (anyone feel like they were pandering a little when they gave the only thing resembling a love interest the code letter O?) as a sign of temporal displacement (at this point the plot hole generator switched from a garden hose to a fire hose in the face. She even said that this had only happened once in history but they knew enough to know what chocolate milk means? In comparison to the others this one was golf ball sized, however). At that point the now not extinct race of Boris begins a full scale invasion. J has to go back in time by jumping off a building.
It could be said that the plot was relatively coherent up until this point. Time travel as a plot device is weak and confusing even in competent hands. When fed into the MIB grinder it gets spat out so fast and in so many directions the audience had better be wearing eye protection. How is it J gets shot by the alien spike thing, jumps off a giant gantry, and goes back in time ten seconds but is somehow not shot even though he remembers getting shot? Why when you travel back in time to 1969 you have to first visit the dinosaur times first? If the first time J travels back in time he goes to the same position he started in and effectively doubles himself, but the second time he jumps back into the exact same position he was in to start with and there is only one of him? The list goes on and on.
However, the time travel does do one good thing. It allows us to meet young K, who was really well done by Josh Broslin and my favorite character in the movie. K and J team up after some “who are you” hijinks and work to track down Boris and young Boris. They meet up with an alien who can see the future but do nothing to affect it, making him the most worthless expository sidekick in cinema history. They have to put up a shield in space and do so by attaching it to the moon landing rocket. Stuff gets blown up. Aliens do alien stuff. An ending is pulled from so far up the writers ass if he were the last person in a human centipede he would have actually pulled it from the person three bodies ahead of him.
The stars. There were a lot of really funny moments. Two stars. Young K was really well done. One star. Will Smith, in spite of his bad choices in movie scripts (and being the Fresh Prince of Bel Air) is entertaining. One star. Boris was a pretty cool villain. One star. Good special effects. One star. In spite of everything, I honestly can’t say it wasn’t fun or entertaining. Two stars. Total: eight stars.
The black holes. Really, really, really stupid story. Two black holes. I am running out of funny analogies for how massively huge plot holes can be in a movie, but the ones in this film could have eclipsed the sun. Two black holes. While I find him entertaining, there is only so much “Will Smith is the coolest guy in the world and everyone else is a dork on the screen” I can take. One black hole. The future telling alien was so hippy dippy I wanted to reach into the screen and slap him every time he opened his pie hole. One black hole. The ending was so dumb, contrived, and out of no where it could have been a supporting character Agent D (I actually heard they started filming this thing without a completed script and it make sense). One black hole. Total: seven black holes.
A grand total of one star. Meh. Better than MIB2 in my opinion. Worth seeing? Maybe. If you are a Will Smith fan or just have nothing to do at all on an evening it beats staring at a wall. Don’t see it just because you are a massive Tommy Lee Jones fan, as he is hardly in it (unless you like the idea of a great Tommy Lee Jones impersonator). Date movie? Sure, why not? Unless she is familiar with sci fi and the paradoxes of time travel most of this stuff won’t bother her. No hot girls to feel in competition with. All the guys keep their suits on so no losing a lot in comparison. Bathroom break? Most likely the entire scene with Andy Warhol. Once the joke that he is an MIB agent is made there isn’t much left but they keep beating it into the ground. You won’t miss much.
Thanks for reading. I will try to see something tomorrow afternoon. Probably Chernobyl Diaries. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have comments about this movie or review feel free to post them here. If you have an off topic question or suggestion feel free to email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.