MEN IN BLACK 3

Barry Sonnenfeld started his career as a director with the early 90's nostalgia fest adaptation of The Addams Family, which was much better than anyone expected, turning what could have been a enjoyably nutty one-off into a mini-franchise.  Any other quirky, kooky, one-offs he directed that accidentally turned into franchises?  Well...  it depends whether or not you count Get Shorty.   But more obviously, I'm talking about Men In Black, the 1997 film adaptation of an obscure (and mostly different) comic that spawned four years of an animated series, a sequel that almost killed the franchise, three video games, two rap singles, and a theme park ride.  And now another sequel with 3-D and time travel!  Nod ya head!

I would say MIB is the film where Will Smith found his screen persona.  Bad Boys and Independence Day were more traditional action roles that he injected his personality into, Six Degrees of Separation proves in retrospect that he could have become a more serious dramatic actor if the temptation of becoming a living franchise wasn't too strong.  No, I think Men In Black is where he settled into a comfortable, just-different-enough variation of his TV persona, and essentially kept playing that part.  Will Smith still chooses projects that vary wildly from time to time, but its still clear what the baseline is and what the outliers are.  Hitch is baseline, I Am Legend or Ali or Seven Pounds (more on that later) are outliers.

Sonnenfeld didn't mention Men In Black II much during the press for this film, referring more to capturing the magic of the original.  I don't really think that's possible.  The best parts of the first film couldn't/can't really be repeated.  We can only have Will Smith as our cocksure audience surrogate discover the secret world of the MIB once, we can only have Tommy Lee Jones deliver a good performance once before he gets bored and merely shows up to sleepwalk his way to a paycheck that will help support his time in other projects he cares more about.  You can't get Vincent D'Nofrio to come back as the villain again, and he's probably the best part of the first film.

Men In Black II had many problems, and a large share of them were caused by awkwardly trying to recreate aspects of the first film.  Agent K retired, got his mind-wiped, and reunited with his lost love of 35 years.  But people liked him.  So they brought him back.  People liked Will Smith being cocky even though he's in over his head.  But now he's been an Agent for five years.  So they made a story that kept him in the dark.  People like the bugs, the dog, Tony Shalhoub, and opening the film with a small but super weird scene of MIB business-as-usual to set the tone, so they did all that again too.

This time, the worms are just cameos, and the dog appears to be dead.  Tony Shalhoub is too rich to appear again.  J & K are still partners.  We still open with a weird scene (one of the pussy cat dolls uses jiggling cleavage and a jiggling space cake to break installment villain Boris The Animal out of MoonGitmo) although the first scene of official MIB activity is disappointingly generic.  Later on, a space gun shootout at a Chinese restaurant offers the kind of fast paced weirdness that the whole series hopes to capture.  And Earth no longer appears to be a Casablanca-esque planet for refugees or exiles or whatever; now we have a moon-prison filled with (I'm guessing) aliens and I don't think any of those aliens got a fair trial.  MoonGitmo!

The previous MIBs certainly had their moments of poignancy and sentimentally (executive producing by Steven Spielberg can usually guarantee this things... usually) but this film has a peculiar focus on heartfelt sappiness.  Beyond the actual repercussion of time travel to the timeline of the MIB universe, the retcons and character revelations in this film do more to muddle the waters of the series canon.  Lets just say that the first time J and K met wasn't the first time they met, and when K was lovesick for the woman he abandoned in the first film, he was also lovesick for this other British lady that he didn't actually ever abandon. 

Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones were a good double act in the first film.  The old cliche about a buddy cop movie is that the partners are always opposites, but MIB doesn't play it that straight.  First of all, they don't start out enemies and begrudgingly become friends.  No, K is training a partner/replacement.  Actually casting actors who are very different helped too.  Think of successful buddy cop movies.  48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour.  You don't need characters with wacky, over-emphasized disagreements/dissimilarities.  Sure, you can have them.  But it's more important to get two good actors of very different styles for that buddy-cop magic.

That magic was mostly gone in the 2nd film, and in this film it exists mostly between Will Smtih and Josh Brolin, who delivers on all the enthusiasm that his No Country For Old Men costar TLJ can't muster.  But the film places so much emphasis on the J/K relationship, portraying them at defacto father and son rather than ideal partners, that it's pretty hard not to notice that the relationship is mostly gone.  Will Smith is now a brand, a factory, an industry, and an empire, but he's still trying more than Tommy Lee Jones, who would rather give a sleepy performance than disappoint fans by not appearing altogether.

If you're looking for a film that recaptures that Men In Black magic, I recommend Men In Black.  It's probably been a while since you saw it.  I re-watched it recently (on era-appropriate VHS) and it holds up better than you think.  Plus it ends as the launching pad for a totally different franchise.  Tommy Lee Jones is gone, and happy about it.  Will Smith modified his MIB uniform so he looks like Montel Williams at a funeral.  Linda Fiorentino has become an agent much the same way Will Smith did, by stumbling across alien activity repeatedly (despite memory wipes) and being able to kick alien ass when necessary.  Where did the series actually go from there?  Back in time. 

 
~ Will Smith's record for MIB themes songs stands at a solid 1-1 so I guess he didn't want to risk tarnishing that.  Pitbull provides the theme here, Back In Time, which so liberally samples Mickey & Sylvia's Love Is Strange that you might as well just go listen to that tune.  Or watch the film Casino, where it plays when Robert DeNiro sees Sharon Stone for the first time, which has to be the only way anyone under the age of sixty knows the song.  When I saw this movie, and the song Back In Time played over the credits, I actually overheard two different groups arguing about whether or not the song was by Flo Rida.  Nope.  It's Pitbull.

~ Seven Pounds might be the worst film I have ever seen.  It's definitely in the running.  Barry Sonnenfeld's professional association with Will Smith also means he had the dubious honor of directing Wild Wild West which is often labeled one of the worst movies of all time.  I would watch Wild Wild West at least fifty times before I considered watching Seven Pounds again.  Seven Pounds was so bad that Will Smith didn't make another movie until now.  And that man is a goddamn hit-making machine!

~ David Cross does not make a third appearance in the series, but one of his Arrested Development co-stars has a brief cameo.

~ There's a part that very much feels like it was written to be the third appearance of Deebs, the sleazy supplier of renegade technology played by pre-Monk Tony Shalhoub, but then rewritten to be some other guy with a similar line of work who isn't now Monk.

~ Nick Cannon does not return.

~ Tommy Lee Jones enjoys his apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese on top.  Classic old person!

~ Will Smith plays Mass Effect 3, because this is a film about humans dealing with aliens, and he plays it on a PlayStation 3, because this film was made by Sony.

~ Rip Torn might be uninsurable in big studio pictures ever since he got so drunk he tried to rob a bank but fell asleep.  His memorial opens the film, and Tommy Lee Jones eulogizes their "over 40 years" spent working together.  But then there's no young Zed in the 60's scenes.  Missed opportunity!  Sledgehammer is there, but he doesn't get to do much.

~ Speaking of time warps, Tommy Lee Jones still plays older than he really is; wrap your head around the fact he was only about fifty when the first film was made.  Emma Thompson plays older than she really is; that poor woman was born in 1959 and she still had to play Dustin Hoffman's love interest.  Will Smith of course plays younger than he is (what could you expect?) but Josh Brolin bucks the trend by playing younger than he really is.

~ The women get sidelined.  Agent O is introduced in the first act when she's Emma Thompson, then reintroduced in the second act when she's Alice Eve, and then doesn't feature into the final third of the story at all.  The climax isn't too busy to support one more character.  They could have involved her.  Otherwise, why the hell is she in the movie?  And wasn't Tommy Lee Jones already pining for a lost love?  He already had that problem!

~ Jemaine Clement channels Tim Curry (of 25 years ago) to play the villain Boris, so contentious and disagreeable that he gets in a screaming match with himself when he travels back in time.  Boris is claws, claws, and more claws and any part that doesn't look like a claw is just a row of claws held tight in a fist.

~ Not enough aliens!  Special effects and make up legend Rick Baker provides untold numbers of briefly glimpsed background ghoulies and ghastlies, but major alien characters are lacking.  You got your villain, and then you got Michael Stuhlbarg playing an alien from a race of every-dimension perceiving MacGuffinoids.  More aliens!

~ The monocyles are pretty stupid.  Why do they have better technology in the past?  What is this Star Wars?

~ This film takes place in 2011 because that's probably when they thought it would be released.  There was some behinds the scenes troubles, the budget ballooned to over 250 million dollars, but the damn thing is finally here and you can see most of that money up on the screen.

~ The whole celebrities-being-aliens thing is mostly a background joke, where you can spot Lady Gaga or Tim Burton on a view screen.

~ The old security guard is back.  I would have revealed him as being secretly in charge of the MIB.  Get it?!?  He's hiding in plain sight.  That one's free, Sonnenfeld!

~ Bill Hader appears as Andy Warhol because some celebrity from the 60's had to be in this, and I guess they had to be in New York, and it's probably better than they're dead so nobody complains, and he was a campy weird guy with a distinctive look but just in case they mention his most famous paintings so you'll know who the hell the weirdo in the white wig is supposed to be.  Time travel!

~ Barry Sonnenfeld was the director of photography for the first 3 Coen brothers movies, which puts him high in the running for the title of the 3rd Coen brother alongside Carter Burwell, Frances McDormand, Sam Raimi, Roderick Jaynes (Roderick Jaynes is the Coen's longtime 'credited' editor and I have read references to him being a real person which means some people don't know that Roderick Jaynes is a somewhat obvious pseudonym for the Coens themselves) or any number or actors who appear in many of their films.  His visual style, with lots of deep focus shots, frenetic push-ins and pull-backs, was a trademark of, uh, really only one Coen Brothers movie, Raising Arizona, but there are certainly other more subtle instances of it in their work, especially in their remake of The Ladykillers, which was supposedly originally a Sonnenfeld film before they took over. 

~ PSEUDO-SPOILER
   When somebody mentions in the first act of a time travel movie that their father was never around during their childhood, you might as well just reveal that their real father is Anton Chekov and get it over with.