Movie Review: Men In Black 3

Plot: When Boris the Animal, an alien criminal from Agent K's past, breaks out of prison he travels back in time and kills K. Agent J, being the only one who remembers K must then go back to 1969 to stop the event from taking place.

After the flop of 2002's, Men In Black 2, which was truly terrible, it seemed that the MIB franchise was finished, they had not struck gold twice. Finally, ten years later another sequel was put into production and it seemed that it too would be a disaster. When MIB3 began shooting, there wasn't even a finished script, a certain doom for any film. Not only that but once the script was finished, they shut down production of the film completely for an entire month to go back and polish the scrip up even more, once again a very certain doom for any film. So finally, after several rewrites and a month long production hiatus we have Men In Black 3. But how does it hold up after a decade hiatus?

I'm happy to say that MIB3 is leaps and bounds better than the dreadful sequel. However, that isn't saying much, so let's dive in and see if instead of being better than the sequel it's just simply a good film.

As I watched the film I began to notice two things; the film is not that funny, but the story was good and I was still enjoying the film.

What I hated about the second film was that they forced so many slapstick, unfunny stuff into the film you couldn't even breathe. The pug Frank for instance is good for a laugh in a very small dose, but they put him in so much of the film by the end of it you were begging for him to be ran over. They threw alien after alien at you like the "ballchinians" which might seem funny to an elementary school boy, but the joke falls flat with adults. They crammed so much of that stuff into the film fishing for laughs, the story winds up dead on the side of the road.

Thankfully they stayed far away from that in this film. There were some laughs in the film, but it really went for a more serious tone. Of course it wouldn't be an MIB film if the Earth wasn't facing destruction from some alien race, but this time around you actually are worried that it might happen. The villain, Boris, is a much more devious character. He kills without question and their is no comedic tone to him, unlike the hilarious bug from the first film and the hollow, flat character of Serleena from the sequel. Boris's motive is revenge. He's been left armless in a lunar prison for 40 years thanks to Agent K and he wants his payback.

The cast this time is much improved as well. Will Smith took a break from acting in 2008 to devote his time to family, and he makes his comeback here on a high note. Smith is great as usual, but isn't given much to work with comedic wise. He has some great moments where you see the old school Will Smith, but his character this go around is given a much serious role. He's got some daddy issues going on, he's got trust issues with K and then once K's gone he jumps back in time just as the Earth is being destroyed by an alien invasion which causes for a more down to business J.

Josh Brolin joins the cast this go-round as a 29 year old Agent K. He does an outstanding job of personating Tommy Lee Jones throughout the film giving his character a much more likable personality. In 1969, K isn't the old, grump agent J is accustomed to. Something happened that made K that way and J is determined to find out what it was. With the roles now reversed, K is the young agent (new hotness) and J is the older senior agent (old and busted). This is something I thought they really dropped the ball on. I thought it could have made for some good laughs if they played off the fact J is now old and K is more limber and athletic.

Some new characters are introduced as well. At the start of the film, MIB director Zed has passed away and Agent O (Emma Thompson) takes on the role of new director. The 1969 version of Agent O is played by Alice Eve. I like the character of O, but I felt as if they could have developed her better. There was a story involving her in the film and instead of exploring it, they just beat around the bush with it and left you wondering towards the end. Both O's come off in the end flat. My new favorite character had to be Griffin. Griffin is an alien who is the last of his kind. His power is that he can see every possible timeline outcome, but he doesn't know which timeline he is in. He is a very in-depth and likable character I would like to see more of.

Comedy has beat the time travel aspect to death so I wasn't thrilled when I found out the synopsis was J going back to 69'. Thankfully, they do this in a very toned down manner. It's not your typical, cliched time travel film where everyone is wearing platform shoes and listening to disco and afros are all over the place. I really appreciated the fact that they went the conventional route on this and thought it was worth mentioning since it was one of my main concerns.

The film is not without it's flaws, there are some holes in the story. As I mentioned earlier, there is a whole backstory between K and O that never gets explained. In the film there is definitely an akward romantic relationship going on between the two. This story conflicts with the previous film's stories of K having to go missing in action from his fiance to join MIB. Both previous films stress the affection he has for his wife, so I found it odd that now all of a sudden he is having a relationship with someone else.

The conclusion of the film could have been developed better as well. The final showdown between J and K and the 1969 and 2012 Boris flakes out at the end. Throughout the film Boris goes around killing people left and right using a specific skill of his, but in the finale they water down his character. I felt during the film that this was a guy who could really pull off his plan. Of course I knew they wouldn't really have him win in the end, but that's how devious the character was written. Once the finale arrives, he becomes less frightning and more clumsy. Why would he throw J around four different times instead of just putting a spike in his head?

I went into MIB3 with the lowest of expectations and was very happy to walk out feeling new life and been put into the franchise. This is a fun franchise and I think there is a lot to be done with it. Tommy Lee Jones is only in the film roughly twenty minutes so maybe he isn't wanting to do any more, but there is a ton of potential for more film. I would have no problem seeing Will Smith take on the senior role while training new MIB agents.

Final Verdict: 7/10

Movie Review: Battleship

Plot: When NASA discovers a planet with conditions similar to Earth's, they send a high powered signial to it in hopes of making extraterrestrial contact. Seven years later they do, and an international naval fleet gets caught right in the middle of their response. The crews then must work together to destroy the extraterrestrial ships before they regain contact with their home planet and bring the rest back with them.

My intial response to the development of a movie based off the classic board game Battleship was one gigantic eye roll. But when it was announced Peter Berg was on board to direct, my mind was more open to the idea. Berg has a very strong resume in my opinion; Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom and the very underrated Hancock. But in the end it's still a movie based off a board game.

There are so many problems with this film I don't know where to begin so I'll just start with the beginning. The first thirty minutes of the film is such a giant cliche rip off of Top Gun, it's not even funny. You meet Taylor Kitsch's character, Alex Hopper and his brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) at a bar celebrating Alex's 25th birthday. It's implied immediately that Alex is always in trouble and going nowhere in life. While at the bar Samantha (Brooklyn Decker) walks in and catches the attention of Alex. The night ends with Alex being chased by police for breaking into a convienent store trying to get Samantha a chicken burito. The whole thing was so over the top and goofy I was ready to quit right then. And of course this causes Samantha to fall for him, because there is nothing more romantic than a guy getting tazed in front of you with a chicken burito in his hand. That silly goofyness is something the film unfortunately never fully gets away from. Much like the first half of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, it was hard to get 100% into a film that kept pulling you out of serious situations with goofy side stories and charachters. There are some good laughs in the film and I'm a believer that all films should have some humor in them, Battleship just fails on how to mix it in.

The next problem is the cast. This film has a very large cast in it, but I was left scratching my head at the end of it. Your main stars are Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Rhianna, Brooklyn Decker, Jesse Plemons, Liam Neeson and a lot of lesser known actors who have larger roles. But what I didn't understand was the random people who just pop up for a line or two and then disappear. Jerry Ferrara (Entourage's Turtle) literally pops in for two lines and then is never heard from again. Rami Malek who has been an up and comer with a wide acting range literally pops up for two or three lines and then is never heard from again. I was left wondering if their roles ended up on the editing floor or if they're just friends with Berg, but it was definitely a waste of good acting talent which this film needed. Liam Neeson was also a disappointment. You pretty much see him at the beginning and end which was another waste of much needed talent.

That leads me to my next problem which was Rhianna. Now after having twenty four hours to sleep on it, she didn't do terrible for her first acting gig, but I felt that her charachter was very forced, especially for someone who didn't have the acting chops to pull it off. To fully get into a film, I need the actors in it to keep me from realizing I'm watching a film. Rhianna's charachter was written poorly but was given a lot to do in the film which ended up in a disaster of a character.

So what's next.....ah the graphics. A movie like this requries a lot of CGI and plain and simple, no movie with a budget like this ($200,000,000), should have bad CGI. And once the aliens show up, I had no problem with the effects. The ships looked great and there is a lot of destruction that is taking place on the planet and it looked just as good as the second half of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. So I had no complaints......until the actual aliens are shown. Once again, I need to be believing what I'm watching and their appearance completely took me out of the film. The aliens in this film looked like cartoon characters. I liked the design of them, but the execution was horrible and it resulted in a cheap looking film.

This movie had potential and it's a shame that it's tanking at the box office because this is one of those "oh what could have been" films. I'm not going to blame Peter Burg as much as I am the writers. I can't tell you how many times I rolled my eyes at the cheesey dialouge or at characters jumping off the back end of a battleship where two huge propellers were still spinning and hot metal and concrete were collapsing everywhere instead of simply jumping off the side where there was no danger, at where a fight with an alien results in the alien's teeth being knocked out in slow motion. And a few times there were blatant continuity errors. It was almost like the writers put their characters in this situation, couldn't figure how to get them out of it, but then just magically gets them out of the danger without any explanation. It was like being trapped in a room with no door, and then just magically making a door appear without any explantaion. With some good writers who were fully aware of what they were doing, this could have made Transformers look like a little school boy.

This continues into the ending of the film. I won't spoil anything, but at the conclusion of the film everyone acts like nothing big just happend. No acts as if friends and family were not just killed and cities weren't just leveled. Instead they all just hang out and cut up. It was a very fast, sloppy transition.

So with all that being said, with six paragraphs worth of bashing this film, I STILL had an absolute blast with it. I bet you didn't see that one coming.... This is the most torn I've been about a film review. It has every reason to get bad ratings, but I had a good time and the audience did too in fact when the audience burst out clapping and fist pumping throughout the film, I felt it to be a bit overboard but they were having a good time and that's all that matters.

What I thought they did a great job at was incorporating the game into the movie. Something I thought was going to come off terrible and would the film turned out to be a fresh new idea that I bought into. With communications down, they had to play hit and miss with their missles. The alien missles resemblence to the pegs used in the game was a nice touch. I appreciated the fact that although the writing was terrible in spots, they did not use cheesey lingo like, "They sunk our battleship", which I would have bet my life on would happen. I liked that they restricted where the ships were. The aliens put up a field allowing no one in or out. This helped keep the action in one place.

Another thing I really loved was how they honored veterans and service members who had been injured in the line of duty. One of the main characters in the film is Greg Gadson. Gadson, a lieutenant colonel with the Second Battalion and 32nd Field Artillery, was returning from a memorial service for two soldiers when his vehicle passed a roadside bomb on May 7, 2007. In the bombing he lost both of his legs. While his acting chops weren't as admirable, you looked right past that due to the mere sacrafice he gave for our country. He does however have the worst fight with an alien I have ever seen. Cheese galore right there. The other thing they did was bring on veterans to help bring the USS Missouri back to life to fight the final ship. Even though this resulted in one of the cheesiest montages I've seen, it was cool to see that on screen and some of them got some great one liners in the film, (I'm glad someone did).

And finally I really dug how it all played out on the ocean. Most movies are land based and I was wondering how well a film based on a board game that is based on the ocean would translate on screen and it was a breath of fresh air. I've seen buildings crumble, I've seen jets fly through the air shooting at each other, I've seen tanks run through villages, but I really liked how they kept this mainly at sea. It was neat seeing battlships and destroyers, seeing how their weapons worked and what their hulls looked like. It was a good take on something new.

So in conclusion, the bad heavily outweighs the good in this film. The actors did their best, the writers did their worst and Berg did the best he could to string it all together. And he must have done a pretty good job because I still had a good time.

Final Verdict: 6/10 BUT.......a good 6/10.

Movie Review: The Dictator

In 2006 I witnessed one of the funniest movies I had ever seen in a theater. Of course I'm talking about Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat. In 2009 he released his follow-up Bruno, which failed to connect with audiences like Borat had. It lacked the "shock factor" of the previous film and in my opinion took a dip in how funny it was. Can Cohen's third film, The Dictator be his comeback, or will it be even worse than Bruno?

In the film, Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, dictator of Wadiya. Aladeen prides himself in making Wadiya as opressed as he possibly can, executing citizens for silly reasons and he constantly has the United Nations on his back for his hoarding of nuclear weaopons. When his uncle informs him that the United Nations will be taking serious action on Wadiya, he decides to head to New York to address the United Nations. While there, his uncle Tamir (Ben Kingsley), arranges for Aladeen to be kidnapped and executed. He will then have Aladeen replaced with a double and announce that Wadiya plans on becoming a democracy so he can benefit from the oil reserves the country has to offer. Aladeen narrowly escapes the execution and finds himself alone in New York. He runs into a female activist (Anna Farris) and is given a job at her co-op. While trying to make a life in New York he runs into his thought-to-be executed head nuclear scientist. Together they plan on breaking back into the UN so they can stop democracy from taking place and build a super nuclear bomb.

This is Cohen and director Larry Charles third pairing. In this film they decide to go away from the mocumentary style film and deliver a traditional shot film, probably a good decision with Cohen's face being more recognizable than ever. But how does it stack up against Borat and Bruno. The answer, not well.

As I watched this film, it felt like Cohen and Charles's ideas were being recycled over and over again. The film is an hour and a half long string of slapstick humor and offensive dialouge. That's not to say there isn't some really funny parts, there are, but the bad in this film heavily outweigh the good. It almost felt like they were playing it safe with the amount of stupid slapstick jokes that was in the film in comparison to the non-filter style his previous two films had. What I liked about the previous films was that he was interacting with real people. Cohen loves having that no filter, say whatever I want type dialouge because the reactions he gets from your everyday person is priceless. In The Dictator the jokes feel forced and often times last longer than they should. If Cohen hopes to continue with this style of films, he and his team are going to need to come up with a better idea than what they put on the screen this go around

The rest of the cast is pretty forgettable as well. The whole time I was wondering how Sir Ben Kingsley ended up in this film. He's given next to nothing to do and seemed like a waste. I was embarassed for him. Anna Farris is another problem in the film. Can someone tell me if Anna Farris has ever been funny in anything? Anyone......no? She plays a hippie activist who takes Aladeen in. He's extremely offensive towards her to the point that no one on the planet would tolerate him. She gives the same terrible performance she gave in all four Scary Movie films. In fact this is her worst performance since Scary Movie 4. I read that Kristen Wiig and Gillian Jacobs had also been up for the role of Zoey. What were these casting directors thinking, either would have been leaps and bounds better. The one bright spot for me was John C. Reily's very short part as the very racist bodyguard who is hired to execute Aladeen. I wish we could have seen more of him.

This summer doesn't look very promising. Dark Shadows tanked last week, this is sure to tank and Battleship is already getting destroyed by critics. Bottom line is if you see The Dictator on HBO one night and nothing else is on, go for it, you'll get some laughs but stay away from the theater.

Final Verdict: 4/10

MOVIE REVIEW: The Avengers

Plot: When Loki, brother of Thor is sent to Earth by an unknown alien race to steal the powerful tesseract (the cosmic cube from 2011's Captain America), Earth's mightiest heroes must assemble to stop him from bringing along an alien invasion that wants to enslave mankind.

Five years ago, Marvel Studios set out to do something unprecedented. Their plan was to release five solo films, each starring a member of The Avengers and then bring them all together for one epic film. Speculation immediately began on whether such an endeavour could work. Could that many charachters, that many movie stars all share the same stage and it still translate well on-screen?

The answer to that my friends is yes, and it's all thanks to one man. When it was reported that Joss Whedon would be in the director's chair for The Avengers there was a split reaction from fans. Some thought he didn't have the big screen experience to pull off such a feat. His work had mainly been televison, and had directed only one other film prior, so I could understand people's cause for concern. I on the other hand thought it was a home run hire. You see, Whedon knows his way around the Marvel universe much better than directors Jon Favreau (Iron Man, Iron Man 2), Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk), Kenneth Branagh (Thor) or Joe Johnston (Captain America) could ever hope to. Whedon had written several comic book series for Marvel prior to this. He is a fan first, writer/director second and that was why it was a genius hire.

What I was most worried about going into the film, turned out to be what impressed me most about it. With six main members of The Avengers team; Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye and Black Widow, three S.H.I.E.L.D members; Nick Fury, Agent Phil Coulson and Maria Hill along with Loki and his alien army, I was really worried how well this would balance out. Thankfully, Whedon gives every character an even spread. The film isn't focused on one particular character more than another. Even better, almost every key character has their own defining moment in the film. Everyone gets to be the hero, everyone gets their own moment of applause from the audience (my theater broke out in applause on six different occasions).

The pace of the film is great. While there is plenty of action to go around, it isn't a Transformers, two-and-a-half hour explosion-fest. There is plenty of story and character development complimented with well directed NOT over the top action sequences. One thing that has bothered me about every single one of the stand-alone Avengers films is that they all have very anti-climatic endings. The final battle delivers. It's not drawn out, but it isn't a five minute fight with an easy "get out of jail free" solution to the problem either. When it was over, my appetite had been filled perfectly.

Although there is a very level playing field, one character is by far the show stealer. The Hulk films have been by least favorite so far, which is why I was surprised when he in fact is the one that steals the show. I think Whedon has found this character's niche. Maybe the Hulk doesn't need his own film. Maybe having him be apart of an ensemble is just the thing the character needs. Although the actual Hulk doesn't show until the later part of the film, once he shows, he delivers big. Every scene he's in brought a grin to my face. He is heroic, he is funny and he is scary. However, that doesn't stop Tony Stark from being a very close runner-up. He steals every scene he's in, having one-liner after another. What's even better is the chemistry between Bruce Banner/Hulk and Tony Stark. Tony wants nothing more than to experience the big green rage monster first hand. He even tries enticing him a time or two, only let down when he doesn't get the rage reaction he wanted. And although he didn't have a large role, Agent Coulson really connected with the audience as well. I really enjoyed that he was a fanboy of Captain America. He's starstruck when he's around him, nervous about asking for an autograph. He believes in the Avengers Initiative and has a very nice heroic moment of his own.

All of these positive character traits leads me to one of my disappointments of the film and that is Captain America. Captain America is the leader of The Avengers. No question about it, always has and always will be. He is selfless, follows orders and makes the right choices. While Cap' certainly has some great moments in the film, I kept waiting for that one moment where he steps up and takes the lead. There was flashes of it, but it never comes. Maybe they are waiting for the sequel to really have him step up, but I was just a tad bit disappointed with how he played out. That isn't a huge problem and some may not even care, but as for me that was something that stood out.

There is only one other thing I have to nit-pick about and that is the villains. Tom Hiddleston as Loki did fantastic, no complaints there. But what I didn't enjoy was that if felt like The Avengers were never really in immediate danger. We all knew they would win in the end, but I still like to be on the edge of my seat a little. Loki as great as he is with deception and evil, I never felt like he was truly someone who was going to start offing people. There is one scene where you think he is going to just start slaughtering people but it goes away quickly. I would have liked to have seen a little more villainy in the story.

So what will this film do for the superhero genre? Hopefully forever change it. This should get the attention of Fox who holds the rights to X-Men and Fantastic Four, Sony who has the rights to Spider-Man and most importantly Warner Brothers who owns every DC character there is. Wolverine and Spider-Man are actually member of The Avengers in the comics. This should get them motivated to share profit and put an entertaining film on the screen. How cool would it be if Spider-Man swooped in out of nowhere to help out, or if you see a character's legs walking down the street and all of a sudden his arm drops and three claws come out? The fans would go balistic! And maybe this will finally convince Warner Brothers to get their charaters together. Aside from Nolan's Batman films, those movies are miles behind Marvel.

This movie is a game changer. I have next to no complaints and I absolutely cannot wait until 2015 so I can see The Avengers 2.

Final Verdict: 9/10