Of course, confusion comes with the territory anytime you mix time travel into your plot. It all starts when Jemaine Clement’s Boris the Animal, the movie’s creepy bright spot, escapes from his maximum security prison cell on the moon. Boris has a 40 year old grudge against Agent K, who captured the space criminal in 1969 on the same day that he protected the Earth from an alien invasion and wiped out Boris’ galaxy-threatening Boglodite species in the process. The escaped criminal is now the last of his kind, but he’s hatched a plan that involves going back in time and rubbing out a younger K, played by Brolin, before that fateful day in 1969. All goes according to plan at first, until Smith’s Agent J catches up to what’s going on and follows Boris into the summer of ’69.
There’s also Michael Stuhlbarg, star of A Serious Man, whose fifth dimensional alien ups the time travel headache factor in a big way with his quiet consideration of all possible futures. He appears roughly halfway through the movie, at a party hosted by Andy Warhol — an undercover MIB agent, naturally — and he sticks around for the rest of the adventure. It’s a good thing for that; anything to help us forget that Smith is supposed to be the lead here. Clement helps as well with his ample screen time as both the 2012 and 1969 versions of Boris. He delivers an exceedingly creepy performance, helped in no small part by a heavily modified alien voice and killer costume work from the legendary Rick Baker.
In fact, between Brolin and Stuhlbarg, plus Clement, it’s too bad that Men in Black 3 couldn’t have done away with Smith and Jones and simply framed itself as a proper prequel, without any of the time travel trappings. The 1969 envisioned by director Barry Sonnenfeld and screenwriter Etan Cohen doesn’t feel as period-centric as, say, any of the Austin Powers movies. There are some nice flourishes though, and the suggestion that this could have been a more well-realized trip back in time if we didn’t have to spend so much time worrying about the modern-day side of the story.
Given all of that, I’d say that Men in Black 3 isn’t a terrible movie but it’s not a good one either. It simply exists for the purpose of putting butts into movie theater seats. There’s an obligatory 3D version that feels, like most 3D-optional movies, entirely unnecessary. No matter what you spend on your movie ticket, sitting through the whole thing is akin to spending two hours having your brain wiped by the series’ Neuralyzer, which most fans probably know as the memory-erasing “flashy thing.” You can occasionally catch a glimpse of how this could have been a great movie, but instead we’re left with a mediocre one that never quite coalesces around its better ideas.
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