Can you believe it's been four years that Will Smith has even appeared in a movie.  It seemed like he took time off in his career to shove his annoying children down America's throat with a son so full of false swagger he had the balls to remake The Karate Kid and a daughter who made a song so abbrasive that it should be used as a car alarm.  But before Smith annoyed us with that, he annoyed us by becoming an A-list celebrity who no longer made good movies.  Depending on your taste in films and your standards for what constitutes quality entertainment, you could make a case that Men in Black 2 was his last good movie and that was a decade ago.  So should Will Smith be the only one happy that Tommy Lee Jones agreed to don the black suit again?  If you ask me, the answer is "no way" because it's excellent!

Directory Barry Sonnenfeld is a guy that has a unique style and the Men in Black series seems to be the only commercially successful outlet for it.  But the guy makes great looking films even when they turn out to be complete duds like RV or Big Trouble.  His films feel like Tim Burton movies but without all the cutting and trademarked moping.  Despite the lack of success, I still would put The Addams Family movies in my Top 100 Favorite Comedies.  If anyone else would have attempted to make the next installment of Men in Black, I'm certain it would have been awful since it is as much Sonnenfeld's as it is Smith's and Jones'.

Rule #1 in Hollywood generally is that if you're going to make a sequel, you don't mess with what made it successful.  Well Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones is a massive part of that success since, to those that appreciate subtle humor, his stoic persona is funnier than Smith at times; however in Men in Black 3 you will see very little of Jones at all.  A decision like that couldn't have panned out unless they got the homerun performance they did from Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, True Grit).

Brolin plays Jones' Agent K character but in 1969.  That's right, Sonnenfeld tried to double down on risk and make the next installment a time travel film as well.  Time Travel, as a genre, is the very definition of "Big Risk, Big Reward;" it can either give you fantastic science-fiction stories or some of the worst that just confuse and detract an audience.  I'm thrilled to say that Men in Black 3 is one of the more fantastic ones.  It knows that its target audience didn't come to think so they spell out as much zig-zagging time paradoxes as they have to so as not to lose them all while keeping the classic Men in Black silliness.

But back to Brolin.  As impressive as the special FX are and alien make-up (which Sonnenfeld mutes a little more in this thankfully), the most amazing thing to watch in the film is Brolin's performance.  He is so convincing as a younger Tommy Lee Jones that you completely lose sight that it's Brolin you're watching.  He did this once before in Oliver Stone's W where he did a flawless job portraying George W. Bush.  The man has a knack for vocal nuances and physical impersonation performance.

The other scene stealers are Bill Hader (SNL, Superbad), who is sadly only featured in one scene as a very famous '60s icon and Oscar-nominated Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man, Hugo).  Stuhlbarg plays an alien that is blessed and cursed with constantly seeing every possible outcome to every possible existence and he's amazing at it.  Just like he did in his performance for A Serious Man, he invokes a balanced mix of humor and sadness that makes every scene he's in fun to watch.

The most shocking thing about Men in Black 3, to me at least, was that it almost brought a tear to my eye at the end.  Again, a totally unneccessary risk that Sonnenfeld took but I'm thrilled that he did.  I not only forgot how funny Smith can be but also how well he can move an audience too.  (Need I remind you of the dog scene in I Am Legend?)  It was such a successful ending that it makes me hope the Men in Black series goes out on that pitch-perfect note, but then again I hope they don't if they can still make them this good.
Men in Black 3  (Rated PG-13)
Gavin Grade: A-

Two years ago it was released online that Hollywood was planning on taking the classic Hasbro board game Battleship and turn it into a movie.  It was met with nothing but laughs and jeers at what a horrible film that would turn out to be.  It also launched rumors, some of which have been confirmed, that other classic board games like Ouija, Monopoly and Candyland are getting turned into movies to follow.  Everyone was expecting the worst from Battleship, there was no way it could live up to the awful hype.  I'm here to tell you that not only did it live up to it but it surpassed it.

Director Peter Berg has made some damn good films.  Very Bad Things, Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom are all excellent and impressive feats considering that they're each three different genres that he tackled (literally in one case) flawlessly.  Granted he made Hancock, but for the most part Berg is known as someone who makes quality films.  Why he would ever lend his name to something so epically embarassing as Battleship is beyond me.

You may ask yourself why the movie about battleships warring in open water would ever be about aliens trying to destroy Earth.  That's a great question and I can't answer it for you.  The plot for Battleship is as bad as it gets.  It's the kind of scipt that you wouldn't believe if you hadn't seen with your own eyes.  It gets so bad that toward the end of the film the US Navy finds themselves out of battleships (yes, I know how silly that sounds) and their last resort is the USS Missiouri, which is a 70-year-old floating museum in Hawaii.  The survivng cast members must then get the entire ship in shape for killing off the aliens in less than three hours because that's when the world ends, but the catch is that none of the know how to operate the antique ship.  Their solution is...and I couldn't make this up if I tried...to find old veterans to help them run the ship and go to battle.  Yup.

Even more silly is that there is indeed a scene where the actors are looking at an electronic grid that has pictures of battleships on it and they're saying lines like, "B4" and "E2" in hopes to shoot missiles to hit the enemy.  It was so on-the-nose that I wanted to stand up in the theater and scream out to everyone, "How is no one else laughing at this?!"

The FX are as impressive, bloated and expensive as they come and Berg executes with the douchey precision of Michael Bay.  Battleship continues to double down on itself as a film with goofy story plots and the disgusting budget to back it all up.  Battleship will make plenty of money and I'm sure some people will even find it entertaining, but what it does to Peter Berg's reputation as a director is very difficult to repair.  This is one Battleship that should have been sunk before it got to this point.
Battleship  (Rated PG-13)
Gavin Grade: F