It’s been a long decade but franchise stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are once again donning their dapper suits as agents of the Earth’s secret agency watching over the actual aliens among us. Both Agent J (Smith) and Agent K (Jones) have grown used to each other as partners and, as the movie begins, nothing seems to faze them anymore.
But when a very, very bad alien criminal named Boris the Animal (New Zealander Jemaine Clement, best known for the HBO series “Flight of the Concords”) breaks out of a lunar prison to gain revenge on K, Smith wakes up one day and discovers that Boris has somehow erased K from this timeline. To save his partner—and the world from an impending alien invasion—J travels back in time to 1969, where he promptly runs into a 29-year-old Agent K (Josh Brolin, believably transformed into Jones but with more smiling) and they must work together to correct history.
Apparently, the gap between the last two sequels has helped make “Men in Black 3” a pleasant surprise. It’s nice to see Smith back in a joking mood (here he is in full mouthy “Independence Day” mode) as he dominates in movie in both scene and sensibility. Jones remains as craggily cranky as ever in the few scenes he has, but it’s utterly fascinating watching Brolin (“True Grit”) put his own spin on the K character without devolving into mere impersonation. While the game Clement menaces with his level best, he’s just not as scary as past MIB villains. As the Men in Black’s new boss Agent O, Emma Thompson is funny but woefully underused.
Just as director Barry Sonnenfeld returns with most of the crew who made the first film, “Men in Black 3” returns tonally to the feel and mood of the quirkier, more efficient and certainly more amusing first film. “Men in Black 3” focuses on the intergalactic buddy cop dynamic between Agent J and Agent K, with Brolin’s presence as the much younger Agent K allowing them to engage in the kind of winning odd couple tactics that characterized the first film and got buried under all the big-movie detritus of the second film.
The movie’s relatively straightforward plot (which is kind of ironic for a time-travel flick) allows it to present a coherent, compact story. The jump back to 1969 allows Sonnenfeld to play his favorite game of deploying all these sight and line gags as he imagines what the MIB operation (and the requisite aliens) looked like back then. It’s pretty groovy, baby. While “Men in Black 3” is swarming with CGI (much more than the first two films certainly), it doesn’t feel that way. It really seems like Sonnenfeld deliberately didn’t take everything too seriously and that translated into what appeared onscreen. He even manages to inject an unexpected emotional bit towards the end.
What this means is that “Men in Black 3’s” relatively low profile amid the super-hero box-office offensive may just prove to be to the movie’s advantage. There is something old-fashioned and effective with just how earnestly funny the film is. Will Smith’s return engagement exemplifies this. The film doesn’t try too hard and even a simple bit like the revelation of which celebrities are actually aliens still works well the third time around. Most of all, the movie’s back-to-basics approach makes “Men in Black 3” a surprising piece of summer entertainment, reminding us of just how much we miss these well-dressed guys after all this time.
Columbia Pictures’ “Men in Black 3” opens in Metro Manila theaters on May 23.