Movie Review: Men in Black III (2012)

Men in Black III is a forgettable summer fling, one that seems unnecessary and specious at worse, but still, it's never flagrantly awful, and that's good news. It's just another blockbuster to keep your eyeballs occupied for an hour and a half, and that's a noble enough reason to exist, I suppose. All you can realistically expect from this kind of movie is some neat special effects, and, if you're lucky, every action it presents will be clean and every loose end will be tied up before the credits roll, and perhaps you'll be sent home with a charming one-liner or a bit of dialogue to repeat to your friends and coworkers for the next week. MIB III meets these expectations, and never goes beyond them, just like a good C+ student. Basically, Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith are back as agents charged with policing the extra-terrestrial visitors/permanent residents of Earth. When Jones mysteriously disappears, Smith travels back to July 1969 in order to prevent his partner's assassination by an oddly-coiffed creature, freshly sprung from a lunar prison. It works as a plot, but the first 20 minutes or so are fairly painful to watch. Smith struggles, and fails, to make his dialogue anything but insipid, while Jones has to hold back his genuine pathos so they don't outshine such juvenile material. But once the action begins, things explode and colors splash on the screen and everything's fine and predictable. Josh Brolin steps in to play the younger version of Jones, and he does an admirable imitation of the more youthful, less haggard Jones. Things build to a climax, as they always do, and it's all paid off in the end, as it always is. MIB III is nothing to recommend, surely, but it's certainly nothing to reprimand, either. It'll be there if you need something to do for a little while.