missing in black

Rating: 3/10 (12 June 2012)

I giggled a few times. i think I wanted to giggle. I liked MIB. i liked the music, I liked the wit, the style, the fun premise that had always been there as an undercurrent in serious conspiracy films and nutty urban legends but never fully explored. i liked the hard drinking alien worms, the little witty twists- universes inside universes, the common sense street-cop who wins out against educated morons.
It seems after the original they got stuck. They seemed to run out of things to say, so simply rehashed the old- the talking pug, universes inside train stations, regrowing alien heads and a storyline stolen from Jewel in the Nile.
Here, in the third instalment, they ditched some of the more familiar supporting characters and while I might have applauded that since they already seemed old in the second instalment, they failed to replace them. We still have aliens and their ever-resilient heads in there, but there was a genuine attempt to move things to a fresher place. The time travel storyline should have been brilliant- this was when space/alien mania took off, the birthplace of nutty conspiracy theories combined with swinging sixties free loving, trippy hippy, bring your own bong culture, Get Smart gadgets and a man trying to save the world while being black! It was ripe...and it stank.
Okay bad pun but this film deserves it. It's like you can see the chalk marks where they have started to draw in the plot, you can see where they're going, see them circling the joke, but the finished product is just not finished, it should still be sitting on the drawing board in this state. Will Smith appears to be free-winging it in the hope that eventually he'll brainstorm his way to the punchline- he doesn't get there but we do get to enjoy his working process.Jones plays a man who seems to have reached the end and is willing to embrace it....need I put in the obvious line?
I'm not going to go into obvious plot spoilers, there are plot holes, always are with time travel, its really not an issue except when you end up sitting there thinking eh? You do a little here, but I think in many ways that is because the storyline is too simple. It makes no real attempt to address (or in the style of MIB, exploit and poke fun at), the inherent issues, such as the grandfather paradox, that inevitably come up with time travel, so that you feel as though you must have missed something.
That in the end is what ruins this film. They have tried so hard to avoid the obvious, the cliché, the previous tricks of the franchise that they have left themselves with nothing but holes. The beauty of MIB was not that it avoided clichés but how it played with them, tweaking our expectations in tiny, but deliciously original ways. Without them we are simply left without.