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It s silly to feel sorry for a big studio movie, especially asecond sequel bound to make buckets of money, but director BarrySonnenfeld s Men in Black 3, arriving 15 years after his original and 10 after Men in Black 2, is so creaky and out of touch it inspires pity. Its openingsequences are a near marvel of confusion, mayhem and embarrassmentsfor its actors. If it was a person, you d worry it had dementia. Agents K (Tommy Lee Jones) and J (Will Smith) are back, but thereliable tart and taciturn vs. sweet and sassy energy between themis absent, as if they filmed their scenes independently, actingopposite puppets in front of a blue screen. Their banter isblather. At a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan they manage to fightoff a slew of aliens. In 3-D Rick Baker s creations, while neverintended to be taken seriously, seem goofy, old-fashioned andrepellent in the wrong way that is, you really don't want tolook at them. Even blasting aliens in tandem, K and J still aren tconnecting. J is needier than usual, while K is brooding; an alienhe locked up 40 years ago, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement from The Flight of the Conchords ), has escaped from a lunar prison and is headed back in time, toJuly 1969, just before the first moon walk, to kill K. ( MORE: TIME's interview with Oscar-winning makeup artist andcreature maker Rick Baker's inspirations ) The average moviegoer is well educated in the particulars of timetravel. Even if your high school curriculum didn t include anyH.G. Wells, thanks to Back to the Future, Terminator and dozens of other films, just about everyone knows how itworks. Why don t the fleet of screenwriters who cooked up thisscript? They have J wake up the morning after the bloodbath at theChinese restaurant to a world already missing K. This makes nosense. Boris has gone back in time, but given that he hasn t found or killed youngK yet, old K ought to be alive, well and doing that sort of surlyElvis thing he does in contemporary Manhattan. Instead he s deadand gone, and at headquarters, only the boss and former paramour, O(Emma Thompson, 53 and playing 65 or so, every actress s dream)even remembers old K. Also, an alien invasion has commenced, because while K wascapturing Boris back in 1969 he also put up a shield that preventedanyone from Boris planet to enter the atmosphere. (One morelogistical lament: that would include Boris in 2009.) J goes backin time to save young K and stop the invasion. Just before heleaps, J gets a warning from the guy (Michael Chernus) who lendshim the time traveling device, which looks like a cross between apolice badge and a smart phone, to be careful in 1969. It wasn t the best time for yourpeople, he cautions. J looks baffled, as if being a black mantoday didn t include having some sense of what being a black manin 1969 was like. Maybe he s been hitting the neuralyzer in hisdown time. ( SPECIAL: What year Will Smith landed on the Time 100 list ) Without Jones, it must be said, Men in Black 3 improves considerably. The actual time traveling sequence, whichstarts with Smith in freefall from the Chrysler Building, is thekind of special effect that makes the annoyance of the 3-D glassesworth it for a few minutes. 1969 is reasonably fun and if anyonecan pull off jokes about racial profiling, it is the ever-likeableWill Smith. There s an entertaining run-in with Andy Warhol (BillHader) and the whole Factory gang and a few sweet scenes with aMork-like alien (Michael Stuhlbarg, who starred in the Coen s A Serious Man ). But the best reason for going back in time, and really, when itcomes down to it, the only reason to see Men in Black 3 , is Josh Brolin, who plays young K. His Tommy Lee Jones voice isnot that far removed from the George Bush voice he used in W. , but he hits all those querulous notes just right. Posture, bodylanguage, Brolin nails it; his sideways glance is pure poetry ofTommy Lee-ness. Even if you love Jones, and many of us do, it canbe hard to distinguish between his characters so often maximummisanthropes and his suffer-no-fools public persona. In his briefscenes in Men in Black 3 , which mercifully only constitute 10 or so minutes of screen time,Jones gives the impression that he s genuinely miserable beingthere. Meanwhile, Brolin looks like he s having the time of hislife playing a youthful curmudgeon, and he reminds us what was sodelightful about Jones and his taciturn routine in the first place.J keeps looking at young, cool K and shaking his head. What happened to you? he wants to know. For Jones, likely a case of sustainedsequelitis. MORE : Time's Richard Corliss on W. I am an expert from emt-conduitfittings.com, while we provides the quality product, such as Meter Socket Base , EMT Conduit Fittings, IMC Conduit Fittings,and more.
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