Humor, sparks missing in 'Black'
By Christy Lemire |
May 25, 2012, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THERE'S a moment early on in "Men in Black 3" when Will Smith's Agent J sits down next to his longtime partner, Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K, and bemoans the fact that he's too old for this sort of thing - for running around New York in matching dark suits, chasing down aliens and zapping them with their shiny weapons.
We're paraphrasing a bit. But unfortunately, that's an excellent observation. We're all too old for this sort of thing - the shtick itself has gotten old, and it has not aged well.
Fifteen years since the zippy original and a decade since the sub-par sequel, we now have a third "Men in Black" movie which no one seems to have been clamoring for except maybe Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of all three. Long-gestating, the latest film shows the glossy style and vague, sporadic glimmers of the kind of energy that made this franchise such an enormous international hit. But more often it feels hacky, choppy and - worst of all - not that funny. And it's in 3-D for no discernible artistic or narrative reason.
Smith and Jones don't seem to be enjoying themselves, either, in returning to their roles as bickering secret government agents. When even Smith can't fake excitement, you know you're in trouble. The puppy-doggish enthusiasm is gone, and now his Agent J is just weirdly obsessed, after all these years, with determining why it is that K is so surly. K, meanwhile, remains surly.
But then one of K's adversaries from long ago, the growling, sharp-toothed alien Boris the Killer (Jemaine Clement of "Flight of the Conchords"), resurfaces and forces everyone to revisit the past. Literally. Boris busts out of the high-tech Lunar Max prison - with the help of his girlfriend, played by Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger clad in dominatrix gear and carrying a cake - in order to jump back in time and kill the Young Agent K, who put him there.
Boris returns to the summer of 1969, a few days before the historic Apollo 11 moon mission, and takes out Agent K. Agent J shows up for work in the present day and wonders what happened to his partner; once he figures it out, he jumps back a bit earlier to kill Boris before Boris can kill K. Time-travel plots can make you feel dizzy and nauseous if you try and pick them apart to determine whether they make sense, but once we reach our destination here, the jokes provide no pleasant escape. It's all obvious fish-out-of-water stuff and gags about how ridiculous hippies looked.
"Men in Black 3" begins to address the possibilities of how it must have felt for a strong black man in America during this tense time for race relations, then backs off.
All the familiar and rather flat comic elements lead up to a revelatory climax that comes out of nowhere and in no way earns the sort of heartrending emotion it aims to evoke from its audience.
But the most disappointing part of all: Frank the talking pug is nowhere to be found.
We're paraphrasing a bit. But unfortunately, that's an excellent observation. We're all too old for this sort of thing - the shtick itself has gotten old, and it has not aged well.
Fifteen years since the zippy original and a decade since the sub-par sequel, we now have a third "Men in Black" movie which no one seems to have been clamoring for except maybe Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of all three. Long-gestating, the latest film shows the glossy style and vague, sporadic glimmers of the kind of energy that made this franchise such an enormous international hit. But more often it feels hacky, choppy and - worst of all - not that funny. And it's in 3-D for no discernible artistic or narrative reason.
Smith and Jones don't seem to be enjoying themselves, either, in returning to their roles as bickering secret government agents. When even Smith can't fake excitement, you know you're in trouble. The puppy-doggish enthusiasm is gone, and now his Agent J is just weirdly obsessed, after all these years, with determining why it is that K is so surly. K, meanwhile, remains surly.
But then one of K's adversaries from long ago, the growling, sharp-toothed alien Boris the Killer (Jemaine Clement of "Flight of the Conchords"), resurfaces and forces everyone to revisit the past. Literally. Boris busts out of the high-tech Lunar Max prison - with the help of his girlfriend, played by Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger clad in dominatrix gear and carrying a cake - in order to jump back in time and kill the Young Agent K, who put him there.
Boris returns to the summer of 1969, a few days before the historic Apollo 11 moon mission, and takes out Agent K. Agent J shows up for work in the present day and wonders what happened to his partner; once he figures it out, he jumps back a bit earlier to kill Boris before Boris can kill K. Time-travel plots can make you feel dizzy and nauseous if you try and pick them apart to determine whether they make sense, but once we reach our destination here, the jokes provide no pleasant escape. It's all obvious fish-out-of-water stuff and gags about how ridiculous hippies looked.
"Men in Black 3" begins to address the possibilities of how it must have felt for a strong black man in America during this tense time for race relations, then backs off.
All the familiar and rather flat comic elements lead up to a revelatory climax that comes out of nowhere and in no way earns the sort of heartrending emotion it aims to evoke from its audience.
But the most disappointing part of all: Frank the talking pug is nowhere to be found.
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