Columbia

PG 13 105 min

Well, gang, it is Memorial Day so you know what to expect. If you are throwing a big party it's time to break out the grill and grab a couple tons of hamburger and hot dogs. This is not the time to experiment with sushi or rack of lamb. Kids are out of school and mom and dad have a day or two off. You want something familiar, not extravagant or groundbreaking. Fair enough. It's been a few years since the MEN IN BLACK series hit the silver screen and a while since Will Smith has had a large payday. There's not much to recall about the hook of the original films. Earth has a large population of aliens, the extra terrestrial types, and the men in black are part of a government organization that oversees them. Kinda social workers for interplanetary-Americans. Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, as agents J and K are the protagonists who deal with whatever hijinks these outer space folks are up to. The two main elements of all the films are first, the computer generated monsters performing a lot of action sequences and second the nonstop repartee between the gregarious J and the stoic K. Here apparently just before retirement the team will be called into action one more time. Super villain Boris the animal ( it's just Boris)

has escaped the intergalactic prison and is bent on the typical super villain quest namely destroying the universe or something like that. As we will discover the end of the world would have been adverted had agent K killed boris many many years ago. K find a way to travel through time for a couple reasons. Mainly to track down Boris, kill him, and avert the end of the world But also because Tommy Lee Jones didn't want to invest a great deal of time into this retread. Smith apparently needs the money.

You see Josh Brolin plays the young agent K. Smith plays his original character as the two will meet many years before be present. It's really not as convoluted as it sounds. Neither, unfortunately, is it a great deal of fun. For one thing the dialoge isn’t special and that’s surprising because they've brought in Ethan Coen to work on the script. Also strangely enough for such a mediocre production is finding the great and powerful Steven Spielberg as executive producer.

Don't get me wrong, this is not completely without merit. There are some clever twists and turns along the way, and even a love interest with Emma Thompson for Jones. Also I must admit the ending was a bit touching.

Michael Stublbarg’s quirky alien character is deserving of note and helps to hoist MEN IN BLACK 3 over the halfway mark.

C+

WSS