Josh Brolin does his best Tommy Lee Jones impression as a younger Agent K in Men in Black 3. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied
QUESTION: Can you randomly select 10 words to make a sentence that has never been spoken, nor written, in the history of all mankind?
Answer: I. Wish. There. Was. A. Third. Men. In. Black. Movie.
(Just to be on the safe side, this has been typed into Google. The only result was a thumbnail picture of Will Smith with his bank manager. Both of them were laughing. I think they were also smoking cigars rolled from million-dollar bills.)
Yes, here by total lack of public demand, is Men In Black 3. This messy, overbearingly loud and barely diverting action comedy happens right in front of you. Then high-tails it out of your memory for good.
You won't be needing a Neuralyzer to be forgetting this in a hurry.
(That's a joke from the first two Men In Blacks. If you don't get it, you've already been Neuralyzed. As a result, read no further. Men In Black 3 may just be the movie for you.)
If the plot for the new MIB often gives you the feeling it was made up on the spot, it is indeed because that is exactly what happened.
In order to catch a tax break that was about to close, production began without a completed script at hand.
Therefore relating a satisfactory synopsis is difficult. And not just because Men In Black 3 is difficult to relate to, and rarely satisfies.
Agent J (Will Smith) must journey back to the 1960s to save the life of his partner, Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones).
Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Just wait. Cranky old K is present and accounted for in the first act of the picture. Then he suddenly disappears.
A one-armed alien named Boris the Animal (Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement) has re-written history so that K dies at the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969. Therefore J must buddy up with the younger, groovier K (played by Josh Brolin) and keep him alive so that everything can return to be as it should be. While there is some high-concept stuff going on about disobeying the laws of the time, the viewer's care factor is guaranteed to remain quite low.
Performances are ever so slightly stilted. Brolin does an uncanny impression of a youthful Tommy Lee Jones, but leaves no impression otherwise. Jones can barely feign interest in his sections of the movie.
Clement earns a pass mark as the villain but doesn't get to do anything funny. Given his reputation as a comedian - and a gifted one - the Conchord is denied all chance of lift-off.
Even Will Smith is nowhere near the top of his game. Which is perhaps understandable. It has been four years since he last starred in a movie.
Any positives? Just the visuals. Not so much the effects, mind you, but the composition going on within the frame.
To the naked eye, Men In Black 3 is a beautifully arranged picture. Every person, prop and pixel has been placed to perfection before the camera. Switch off the sound and cut out all the bits where people yap or monsters go splat, and you've got the most striking screen-saver ever made.
Men in Black 3 [M]
Rating: 2/5
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black)
Starring: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Emma Thompson
"An idea whose time is up"
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