- Location: Century Boulder
- Josh Brolin's impression of a young Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black 3 is brilliant enough that it alone almost makes the film worth seeing. One wonders if this entire project started off as a behind-the-scenes gag on the set of No Country for Old Men that some intrepid soul witnessed and tried to convert into an entire movie. Unfortunately, that impression and Brolin's performance are far and away the best parts of the a film that otherwise pales in comparison to the original Men in Black. Whereas that unexpectedly entertaining offering got a lot of mileage out of fun CGI, goofy creatures, and the clever pairing of Will Smith, one of the most affable actors of his time, with Jones, one of the gruffest, the third film in the franchise feels mostly like the same jokes repeated once again, only with a worse inflection.
- In this iteration, it's a Hell's Angels-type alien known as Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) who threatens galactic balance by traveling back to 1969 to eliminate his nemesis, Agent K (Jones). Needless to say, Agent J (Smith) is willing to do anything to save his partner, even if it turns out that "time jumping" is a more literal description than he initially suspects. Other members of the alphabet soup are present, including Emma Thompson as a Hilary Clintonesque bureau chief, Alice Eve as her younger self, and David Rasche as the 1960's head honcho. Alas, the eminently watchable Rip Torn's recent legal troubles force his character to have died offscreen of natural causes, but Thompson is charismatic enough to replace even him.
- Otherwise, events proceed as though foreordained. This time around, Mick Jagger and Lady Gaga are suspected of being aliens, while Andy Warhol (Bill Hader) is an agent so desperate that he's started painting bananas and soup cans. Michael Stuhlbarg has a charming turn as an alien that can see the futures (plural), while the fate of Mike Coulter's army colonel at Cape Canaveral is sadly predictable. The film's primary offense, however, may be against the usually hilarious Clement, who is wasted completely in an even more extreme version of what was done to Vincent D'Onofrio in the first film. How they could travel back to the 60's and not have Clement play a version of himself is completely beyond me. Smith is never unlikeable, but he and Jones are both completely eclipsed by Brolin, and some of the film's jokes, particularly those having to do with race relations, seem to have themselves traveled here from the past. The result is a merely tolerable film whose weak impression of Men in Black could have been much improved.
