Brad's Take: Men in Black 3 - *1/2

It's late. Much later than my normal review-writing time, and I'm tired, almost as tired of being awake as I am of thinking about Men in Black. Why is it so late? Because I've been sitting here staring at my computer, turning over in my mind the idea of posting the lyrics to Will Smith's theme song to the original Men in Black instead of writing an actual review. On the one hand, I think it would perfectly reflect my feelings on a film which doesn't really demonstrate any more effort beyond cutting and pasting something from somewhere else and calling it a night. But I'm not sure the statement would be effective without a thorough explanation even longer than this one, and it might put me in the position in which I'd come off as the asshole, rather than the team that led to me handing over fourteen hard-earned dollars to see this slop. It doesn't even have the integrity to be really awful, so that I could at least throw out some adjectives with a little emotion behind them. Nope. Instead it's just the hollow corpse of a once-clever and imaginative film.

I'm not too sure what Men in Black 3, or as I like to type it, MIBIII, is about, which is an eensie bit depressing considering how much time I have to imagine writer Etan Cohen spent developing the story for this overstuffed, undercooked turkey. He takes the modern approach to film comedy of creating such an overwhelmingly convoluted plot scenario that it just pounds the audience into submission trying to follow it that they don't even realize that almost none of it is funny. MIBIII seems to fancy itself more of a sci-fi film than a comedy, which would be fine if it raised any interesting quandaries worth pondering longer than it takes to say the name of the film's villain alien race, something like "Vocclorettabillunozenbrout." Wait... No, the simplicity of its ideas force me to the conclusion that it couldn't have been that long, but I remember it being equally nonsensical.

This leaves the film in that criminal territory of ridiculously over-budgeted comedy at (GASP!) $215 million. Money can't buy happiness, or humor apparently. MIBIII reeks of talented people who have simply lost their instinct for what is fun, or funny, and as a result, the film flounders haplessly, desperately grabbing onto anything that might lead to a laugh, and it's twisty time-travel plot means that what they get hold of is (Surprise!) historical anachronisms and a re-imagining of some historical figures and events. And aside from a scene where Bill Hader portrays Andy Warhol as an undercover agent who thinks his work is pretentious garbage, it all feels (Surprise!) as stale as you'd expect a sequel to Men in Black 2 to be, or as I like to type it, as MIBII II B. (In the interest of paralleling MIBIII's hackiness, I'll say that) I wish a man in black would have neuralized me after I walked out of the theater!