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 metal weapony doo-hickeys.
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 and written by a bunch more people than actually get credited, 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 — just not that funny. And of course, 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. Now Agent J is just weirdly obsessed, after all these years, with determining why it is that K is so surly. K, meanwhile, remains surly and reveals nothing.
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.
Once we reach our destination here, the jokes provide no pleasant escape. It's all super-obvious fish-out-of-water stuff and gags about how ridiculous hippies looked.
The best part of our trip to the '60s — the best part of the movie, period — is the arrival of the Young Agent K. Josh Brolin channels Jones in eerily dead-on fashion, from the bemused Texas twang to reticent demeanor to the slightest facial tics.
But Frank the talking pug is nowhere to be found. The movie is a dog anyway without him.
