Black is the new black for Men in Black 3

Fifteen years into their relationship, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are like an old married couple, intimately familiar with each other's habits and quirks.

When this Hollywood odd couple sit down together in an interview for Men in Black 3, the affable Smith plays it like couples counselling, launching into whiny-wife mode about Jones, his sometimes curmudgeonly cast mate.

"He doesn't compliment me when I get dressed," Smith whimpers on a sofa alongside Jones. "He'll just look at my clothes, and he doesn't say anything, and when we go out, he's always on his [mobile] phone. And I just want him to think about me and my feelings."

What does his partner think about Smith's grievances?

"That's bulls**t," says the plainspoken Jones.

With a huge laugh, the two get down to analysing what has made their Men in Black action comedies a billion-dollar box office franchise since the first movie debuted in 1997.

Jones had done big action films earlier in the '90s and won a supporting-actor Academy Award for The Fugitive, but he wasn't an obvious audience draw for a special-effects summer blockbuster. Smith still was a comparative newcomer, breaking out on the big screen only a year earlier with 1996's Independence Day.

So at the start, the potential for Men in Black rested mainly on the clever idea of straight-laced government agents keeping in check the vast, secret comings and goings of aliens on Earth.

Once fans saw the duo together, the franchise became those two guys — Jones' seasoned, surly Agent K and Smith's eager, convivial Agent J.

With 2002's Men in Black II, even the actors concede they didn't get what they wanted — "the second one actually lacked originality," says Jones — yet despite poor reviews, the sequel was a solid hit.

‘Complement each other'

"It's the opposition, man. It is like a married couple," says Josh Brolin, who co-stars in Men in Black 3 as a young version of Agent K after Smith's Agent J leaps back to 1969 to save his partner from a time-travelling alien. "You look at them and you go, ‘Really, they're married?' Then you just see they complement each other in the best of ways."

The rapport was there when they started working on the first film, and it came back in an instant when Men in Black 3 began shooting, Jones said.

Smith, 43, already had a successful music career and a TV hit with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and had made an early mark on the big-screen in Six Degrees of Separation and Bad Boys.

‘You gotta have fun'

Jones, 65, was known for serious roles in such films as Coal Miner's Daughter, JFK and Natural Born Killers. A newbie to comedy when he made Men in Black, Jones says each sequel has been a cheery reunion, mainly because of Smith.

"Will is more generous than anyone, and he spreads joy," Jones says. "He walks into a studio, walks onto a set, and ... he makes certain that everybody's happy. He can't help himself."

"You gotta have fun," Smith says.

Barry Sonnenfeld, who directs the Men in Black movies, recalls that Jones was shooting on his own for two weeks on the first one while Smith was finishing Independence Day.

"Tommy and Will, from the very beginning, from the entire first movie, loved each other. Will genuinely feels Tommy's one of the funniest people he's ever met, because Tommy is George Burns and Will is Gracie Allen. You need both."

With Jones' K as straight man, Smith's J as comic foil, the Men in Black series has delivered one of Hollywood's most enduring pairs of mismatched buddies.

"Partnerships are good engines for narrative," Jones says. "If you think of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the Cisco Kid and Pancho, the Lone Ranger and Tonto. On and on."

The interview ending, Smith rises from the sofa, while Jones slips in a closing dig.

"Help me up," Jones barks.

MIB hasn't aged well

There's a moment early on in Men in Black 3 when Will Smith's Agent J sits down next to his longtime partner, Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K, and bemoans the fact that he's too old for this sort of thing — for running around New York in matching dark suits, chasing down aliens and zapping them with their shiny metal weapony doo-hickeys.

We're paraphrasing a bit. But unfortunately, that's an excellent observation. We're all too old for this sort of thing — the shtick itself has gotten old, and it has not aged well.

Fifteen years since the zippy original and a decade since the sub-par sequel, we now have a third Men in Black movie which no one seems to have been clamouring for except maybe Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of all three. Long-gestating and written by a bunch more people than actually get credited, the latest film shows the glossy style and vague, sporadic glimmers of the kind of energy that made this franchise such an enormous international hit. But more often it feels hacky, choppy and — worst of all — just not that funny.

Smith and Jones don't seem to be enjoying themselves, either, in returning to their roles as bickering secret government agents. When even the most charismatic actor on the planet can't fake excitement, you know you're in trouble. (We're talking about Smith, in case you were wondering.) The puppy-doggish enthusiasm is gone, and now his Agent J is just weirdly obsessed, after all these years, with determining why it is that K is so surly. K, meanwhile, remains surly and reveals nothing.

But the most disappointing part of all: Frank the talking pug is nowhere to be found. The movie is a dog anyway without him.

Don't miss it

Men in Black 3 is released in cinemas across the UAE Thursday.