MiB 3: Behind the suits

Men in Black 3 was not at all what I was expecting from the latest installment of the series following the exploits of the super-secret government organization protecting the Earth from hostile aliens. What I expected was another humor-filled and action-packed adventure in which MiB partners J and K once again save the world from certain destruction.

Okay, well, that's sort of what really did actually happen in the movie, but it wasn't exactly how I expected it to occur, and it's not really what the movie is about.

For one thing, a serious plot with some genuinely poignant moments stands at the heart of this chapter. It answers some big questions about the two characters and their current outlooks on life and their roles in MiB. In spite of some minor flaws and some lulls in the action, MiB 3 delivers a satisfying if not knee-slappingly funny story.

In this episode, J must chase Boris the Animal, recently escaped from prison on the Moon, back in time and thwart his attempt to kill K in the past and prevent the Arcnet from being deployed to protect the Earth from alien invasion.  So, yes, first of all, the element of time travel has been introduced, which is always a veritable can of worms. The worst part is, if you want to travel back in time, you just stop by a music store and talk to a certain guy who has the devices that make it possible. Oddly enough, I saw a case supporting only two of the devices, but the log book he keeps makes it seem like he does this all the time, so one can only assume the devices are rentals and are returned after each time jump.

I'm not even going to bother going into all of the "but if you can time travel why didn't you ...?" speculation because, frankly, this would end up being a much longer and more convoluted exposition.

MiB 3 follows the logic that if you die in the past, then your present-day self, along with all memory of that self, ceases to exist, an idea that immediately took me back to a book from my childhood, the 1953 SF novel Danger: Dinosaurs! by Richard Marsten, aka Evan Hunter aka Ed McBain.

It's up to J to travel back in time and save K from being murdered and being able to deploy Earth's defense system. Naturally, we expect things not work out quite so easily, and it does in fact turn out to be a bit more complicated.

After J's time jump, which, as it turns out, involves a literal jump and a leap of faith all at once, we are introduced to the young K, played by Josh Brolin. I can't say enough about what an amazing job Brolin did impersonating Tommy Lee Jones' elder K. I'm not the kind of person who reads a lot about movies before I see them, preferring to take the films on their own merits, so it wasn't until later that I read much about Brolin's frustrations with and fear of failure in impersonating Jones. As I watched the film, I seriously believed—and, no, I am not joking—that Tommy Lee Jones' voice had been dubbed over Brolin's. That is not the case. It was actually Brolin doing the impression of Jones that he began toying with on the set of No Country for Old Men. Brolin had the voice and cadence down to a, well, down to a K.

Men in Black 3's got pretty much all of what you'd expect from an MiB film—the gross-out humor, the sight gags, the crazy gadgets—but a few aspects just kind of nag at me. For one, I had trouble seeing the Tommy Lee Jones K romantically involved with O, played by Emma Thompson. I just honestly had trouble seeing the old, craggy-faced Jones as a believable love interest to Thompson. I could easily buy the idea of the Josh Brolin K involved with the Alice Eve O and could even see the Josh Brolin K as a love interest to the Emma Thompson O, but Jones just seems, well, old. He's ready for his role as a sheriff in the sequel No Country for Grumpy Old Men. I suppose the real key to that working is more a matter of seeing it develop over time than dropping Thompson and Jones together and having to accept it as is.

And parts of the movie just feel kind of flat, almost as if we kind of know what's coming and we just want it to hurry up and get there. The real suspense isn't whether the MiB agents will save the day, but exactly how they'll do it. And that payoff doesn't come until the very end. While the film has its funny moments, as a whole, the jokes are merely humorous rather than hilarious. It's the kind of humor that elicits chuckles instead of guffaws.

That's fine to some extent because it's not really the humor and action that drive this movie; it's the underlying story about the nature of the relationship between J and K—and not just between J and K the agents, but between James and Kevin, their real identities behind the black suits. The question J keeps asking of K is, "What happened to you?" Central to what this film is really about is exploring the experiences and the underlying nature of the characters, especially the monotoned, unflappable, unexcitable K.

At it's heart, the MiB films are buddy cop stories. The aspect that makes every buddy cop story work is that we like the characters; we have a vested interest in what happens to them. If you have two strong and likable characters, it really doesn't matter how implausible the plot is or how outrageous the stunts are—you care about what happens to the characters.

That, more than anything, is what makes MiB 3 work. We love the craggy, matter-of-fact K, and we love the contrast in the excitable, smart-alecky J. So when J sets out to save K, and in the process save the world, we want him to succeed. In spite of their differences, we know that J and K have a strong bond, even when J hangs up on K when the latter just seems to want to hear J's voice over the phone. The surprise ending to MiB 3 shows us that the relationship is even deeper and more significant than we would have otherwise guessed.

One could make the argument that there are also some serious continuity issues here, given what happened to K in the previous chapter and what it revealed about his history. Certainly valid criticisms, but, at the same time, really irrelevant to the story being told in MiB 3. This is a movie about James and Kevin and their significance to one another as both partners and friends. And that's why it works.

Will there be more MiB films? I'm sure that will be determined more by box office numbers than anything. But whatever the future holds for the franchise, MiB 3 has forever changed how we look at J and K.