From the Department of Inessentiality, Summer Division, comes Men in Black 3, one of those franchises that lost all creative life in the first sequel but keep drawing breath anyway, thanks to an iron lung powered by a half-billion dollars in worldwide grosses.
The concept of a secret agency devoted to controlling Earth’s undercover alien population can only seem novel once, and the Odd Couple dynamic between Will Smith’s chatty, effervescent newcomer and Tommy Lee Jones’ irascible veteran has a shelf life, too. To merely rinse and repeat for the third entry, adding only new creatures and the obligatory 3-D effects, would have buried it deeper into the ground.
Introducing time travel to a series that has never raised that possibility sounds like a desperate ploy, drafting off Back to the Future much like young Marty McFly drafted off cars on his skateboard. Perhaps it wouldn’t seem like a stretch for such a high-tech agency to disrupt the space-time continuum, but taking the franchise out of its natural habitat is what happened when Fonzie jumped the shark. Perhaps that’s why it took a full decade to make the second Men in Black sequel.
And yet director Barry Sonnenfeld, working from a script by Etan Cohen (Tropic Thunder), gets just enough juice out of the time-travel idea to give Men in Black 3 a lift. A plot that has Smith’s Agent J going back to 1969 to save his partner — and the world — allows for ample opportunities to riff on American history and introduces an uncanny Josh Brolin as Jones’ younger self, which twists a tired buddy-movie partnership in subtle and often clever new directions.
As the film opens, a dangerous new threat emerges in “Boris the Animal,” a creature so deadly that he has spent the past 40 years chained up in a prison on the moon. The man who put him there? None other than Jones’ Agent K, who shot off Boris’ arm in the process.