Men in Black III

Indian Express Ratings:**1/2

There is a reason time travel remains a fallback for many a filmmaker trying to do something new with an old story,particularly when it needed a big push to get off the ground. So many impossibilities,improbabilities and twists can be wished away with it that nothing really needs to be logically explained. That is,if a film about aliens living in our midst as well as invading from outer space with regular frequency,and a New York organisation trained to keep them under check,needs any kind of logical explaining.

Still what kept Men in Black entertaining was the sheer enthusiasm of the powerhouse that is Will Smith as Agent J. He is a perpetual boy who approaches everything with such wide-eyed curiosity and walks away with such sheer disdain at another gooey mess spilling on his shoes that you feel right in step.

He has had a good foil in the completely unflappable Jones as his partner Agent K. J asks the questions we want to ask,K keeps the silence of the “deep secrets of the universe” that the authorities want us to believe in.

Men in Black III takes off playing on this difference between the partners. It has been 14 years since J and K became partners and J’s grouse is that K doesn’t really share anything with him and appears to have no real emotions. This feeling is reinforced when K’s eulogy for a dead fellow agent basically entails listing a litany of complaints about him.

However,the screenplay doesn’t really have time for such human interplay and so the older and strangely downcast Jones is done away with. Instead,J is one day told that K has been dead for over 40 years. J realises that a “rogue aline” K had once captured,helpfully called “Boris the animal”,has travelled to the past and changed time and so he needs to do the same. Up he goes all the way to the top of the Chrysler building and “time jumps”.

In comes Josh Brolin as the younger,“29-year-old” K. Again,rather than play on the strangeness of the old times J finds himself in – but for two minor hints about the racialism that existed at the time – the film concentrates on finding its villain through more twists than in the amusement park they find themselves in.

That includes running into Andy Warhol as Agent W,who is exasperated with all the “transcendence” he is supposed to be swirling in. “All models we realised rather late are aliens,” J tells K as they walk into a Warhol party brimming over with them.

A guy who can see the future or rather “many futures” simultaneously swims in and out too,literally,as Michael Stulbarg plays him with a spaced out blankness and prescience that belongs to another,quieter film.

The climax goes all the way to the day of the moon launch,with the older Boris (Clement) and the younger one of the 60s taking on J and K. People are knocked about and left swinging on top of the framework of the rocket launcher and the only time anyone falls,they “time jump” back.

There are some valuable lessons to be learnt here. Brolin is spot on as the younger Jones,for anyone interested in more time travels,that breaks in time are called “temporal fractia” whose symptoms include “a craving for chocolate milk”,and that one can put as many aliens in as many limbless,faceless,insect-crawling forms in a film,but finally what one wants more of is normal humans you can identify with.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com