The Case for Being Back in Black

The Galaxy Defenders are back after a long hiatus and they are bringing with them… well, a lot of sentiment.  And Jermaine Clement.


And Clement is awesome.  If New Zealanders were tall, vile intergalactic gangsters with bodies constructed of smaller spider-like organisms (but that can somehow still lose arms), and who still seemed to be someone rather amusing who would blend in fairly well with the Flight of the Concords crew, then this is the form they would take.


It’s a pity then that the rest of the cast of Men in Black 3 just looks and feels older.  Will Smith as J is as likeable as ever, but despite his strong physique, he seemed to be having a hard time carrying the weight of this film on his broad shoulders.  Tommy Lee Jones is absent for a great amount of the film, and while Josh Brolin does a great impression of his Agent K, the repartee between J and K doesn’t really fire as once it does, the whole “wise and jaded mentor” thing not really working when K is (supposedly) younger than J.

Emma Thompson is along for the ride for a bit, and there are a few other faces that pop up from time to time, though for the most part, I found the secondary characters either unfortunately obvious, serving the needs of the story rather than being interesting in themselves, or else just irritating.  


But, as mentioned, this is mainly Smith’s show, and as I always have time for him, I didn’t find the film itself that bad.  In fact, the special effects are spectacular (the 3D version I saw had the odd effect that looked really good in the third dimension) and there are a few jokes in there (Lady Gaga taking Michael Jackson’s place in the wall of aliens) that made me smile, though some of the more “obvious” ones kind of fell totally flat.


I suppose that I was really mainly disappointed by the over-sentimentality of the film.  I was expected a madcap ride of ridiculous adventures with crazy aliens and a bonkers storyline, and while I got some of that, I was amazed (in a bad way) how much cloying “sweetness” also made its way in and, if that was the film’s objective, how clumsily it was all put together.


And the less said about the alien clairvoyant the better.


Verdict: Men in Black 3 may save the Earth again, but it did nothing to make me think the franchise had been saved.  I can watch Will Smith in almost anything, but this film was definitely at the lower end of that spectrum.  Bright, flashy, and with an hilarious but still mortifying bad guy, the film had lots going for it, but got bogged down with a whole lot sappy stuff that took away a lot of the fun and replaced it with big doe eyes, probably alien ones.  5 neuralisers out of 10.