The 15-year-old Men in Black franchise left a bit of an impact on me when I was little, so when the third movie was released 10 years after the previous one, I was fairly excited. Unfortunately, I was skeptical, too. I was afraid that the movie would only be as funny as the trailer (so, medium) and that it  would try too hard. Having seen it, I can’t say that I was right or wrong, just conflicted.

Fourteen years in the service of Men in Black, the top secret agency monitoring all extra-terrestrial activity on Earth and in the universe, Agent J (Will Smith) is  only surprised by the actions of his partner K (Tommy Lee Jones) who still remains private about his life and emotions. After Boris the Beast (Jemaine Clement), a one-armed alien captured and crippled by K, escapes his maximum security prison on the moon and vows to take revenge on K. After an argument over the phone one night, J starts feeling dizzy and comes into work the next morning with a new partner (Will Arnett) and finds out that K has been dead since the 1960s.

Deducting that Boris the Beast jumped back in time and killed K before K could kill him, and that it was this event that was now causing a massive alien attack on the world, J seeks out a time-jump device of his own and returns to 1969 to save his partner. Oh, and the world, too. He lands in hippie-stocked New York and meets the young Agent K (played by Josh Brolin). It takes some convincing, but eventually they both work to stop Boris.

First of all, the choice to have Josh Brolin play Tommy Lee Jones was ingenious; they really looked like the same person, though I had a little trouble believing that Brolin was 29. Jones looks like George Bush in 10 years and Brolin actually did play W. Bush, so that worked out well. Smith is always good in any role he plays; his versatility makes him one of the great actors of our time. But the new century was going to be the New Will-enium, and we just haven’t really seen that. He spent most of the movie doing his whole shouting thing. Jemaine Clemente (of Flight of the Conchords) played Boris the Beast pretty naturally, but it seemed like he was more Jemaine than Boris.