MIB III kicks off summer movie season
Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, or in this case Agent K and Agent J, are back together and back in action! Well, kind of. In Men in Black III our favorite alien fighting agents are ready for their next test. Only this time agent J has to travel back in time to stop Boris the Animal, “it’s just Boris!!”, from killing Young Agent K. This movie has everything you’d expect from the Men in Black franchise and more. It’s well worth your time to see and it’d probably be best to see it in a theater, but not in 3D because that aspect of the movie is rather pointless.
The film opens with a particularly bad ass alien by the name of Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement), although he seems to prefer just to be called Boris, escaping from a moon prison with the help of a buxom young lady, Nicole Scherzinger, whom you’d recognize from The Pussycat Dolls. After his escape, Boris is out for revenge on the person who locked him up and took his arm, Agent K. After a failed attempt at taking K’s life, Boris decides to go back in time to 1969 to team up with his younger self to kill K before he could take his arm and lock him up. Agent J, clueless about Boris and his plans, returns to work the next day only to find that no one knows whom he is referring to when he mentions his partner Agent K. But because of an un-dying thirst for chocolate milk, J’s boss, and new leader of the MIB, Agent O, recognizes this as a clue that there had been a rift in the space time continuum. The only way to make things right is for J to travel back in time and team up with Young Agent K (Josh Brolin) to stop Boris the Animal and to make things right in the world; and when I say make things right, I mean to stop it from being destroyed by an alien invasion.
MIB III was a lot of fun, it took characters you were already familiar with and put them in a new adventure. There were a lot of jokes and even some dark humor that only I laughed at. To add some spice to this new MIB adventure the writers had the always-great Will Smith travel back in time where he worked with the younger versions of these same characters. This was a chance for us to see new actors playing the roles of some of our favorite characters, which also lead to a lot of great cameos!
The only downside of this was screen time for Jones was minimal. Brolin played Young Agent K and he destroyed the role. He was every bit as hard as Jones; he had the same mannerisms and same attitude. Brolin is a name that will always attract me to see a film. We got to see Emma Thomson in the role of Agent O and then her younger counterpart Alice Eve. Speaking of cameos we got to see the likes of Will Arnett as Agent J’s partner Agent AA (unfortunately a very small scene). We also see Bill Hader as Andy Warhol, and Michael Stuhlbarg as an alien that helps save the world. I’m particularly fond of Stuhlbarg for his work in the Coen Brothers A Serious Man. Finally one of the most surprising roles was that of Boris the Animal who was portrayed by Flight of the Conchord’s Jermaine Clement who was excellent as always. Also, a little bit of a spoiler here, we get to see young Agent J! Yea, he’s like 4 here. Also because of the time travel there was some fun in seeing what MIB HQ would look like in 1969. You’ve got hippy aliens, old wooden desks and blatant racism; because hey, it was hard to be black in 1969.
It was hard to tell because of the 3D, but some of the effects and computer graphics didn’t look particularly sharp and there were some corny jokes. Overall Men in Black III was a great way to kick off the summer movie season, which is sure to be great!
