Men in Black III (In Ginormous 3D IMAX!)

Impressions before seeing it
I don't actually remember the second movie at all (only saw it once years ago, as opposed to seeing the first one several times even though I saw it even longer ago), but Men in Black is generally a fun franchise.

How was it?
MIB III didn't start off too well, as it begins with the film's over the top villain, Boris the Animal (played by a completely unrecognizable Jemaine Clement - yes, the guy from Flight of the Conchords) breaking out of moon jail. Everything about the scene is hackneyed, and Boris' dialogue throughout most of the movie is kind of heavy-handed. Then we have Will Smith's J doing a lot of "Yo, I'm the hilarious black guy!" with some bland one-liners. I can't remember to what extent he did this in the previous movies, or if it worked better in the first two, but it fell flat here.

However, the film does pick up when K (Tommy Lee Jones) is around, and J eventually has to go back in time to save his partner's life. Josh Brolin as a younger K does a fine impression of Jones and even bears a slight resemblance. Perfect casting there. Even though Jones was absent for much of the movie while J visited the past, and J was still the protagonist, to me this installment was all about the development of K's character, which I appreciated. And as I repeatedly say, I'm a fan of things involving time travel and altering of timelines.

The highlight, as with all three films in the series I suppose, is the special effects on the weird alien creatures. Watching the movie on a giant IMAX screen, it was more or less in high definition and everything looked disgusting - which is to say it looked great, because you could see all of that alien slime and guts and what have you (there is a great action sequence involving J and a giant killer fish that is one of the more memorable scenes in the movie). As for the 3D, I think it was underused. There were only a couple of scenes where it looked cool, but there weren't enough eye-popping shots to warrant it being in 3D at all. The best part for 3D was actually the trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man beforehand, which looks to be visually fantastic.

Recommendation
For the third movie in a series, MIB III is not as bad as it could be. It mostly fails as a comedy (though you do get some amusing cameos from Bill Hader and Will Arnett), but as a sci-fi action time travel alien movie, there is enough fun to make it worth watching. Fans of the series should, I presume, be pleased that they're getting more of the same.