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Isn’t it the worst when you see a trailer for a movie that you’re looking forward to and it’s, well, a piece of crap? Sometimes it turns out that the movie is actually fantastic and just the victim of a bad trailer (such as The Dictator), and sometimes that movie is just a flop (such as Dark Shadows). I’ll be saving you that risk from now on, as I’ll be checking out the films with the lousiest trailers and seeing whether it’s just poor editing that made the trailer terrible, or if no amount of editing could make it good. Today’s study: Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black 3.

The trailer begins with Will Smith Neuralizing a crowd of people, and telling people not to flush goldfish down the toilet so he won’t have to deal with large frightening creatures again. He then talks about how he is getting too old for his job, and then we see him fighting Chinese people in a Chinese restaurant, and we think that the movie must handle the race issue really well. Will Smith then jokes about Tommy Lee Jones’s age. In response, he says that he only promised Will Smith “the secrets of the universe, nothing more,” leaving Will Smith confused. And then Tommy Lee Jones goes through a strange hole.

Will Smith goes into the Men in Black HQ looking for Tommy Lee Jones, but only finds Emma Thompson (what?), who says that Tommy Lee Jones has been dead for 40 years. Obviously, Tommy Lee Jones went back in time and altered history, so Will Smith will need to do the same. And then there’s a pot joke. Will Smith jumps off the Chrysler Building to go back in time, and wakes up to see Josh Brolin playing Tommy Lee Jones. It’s the late '60s because “All Along the Watchtower” is playing. Josh Brolin immediately trusts Will Smith, and they go to see Bill Hader’s Andy Warhol, who, surprisingly, isn’t an alien, but a MiB agent. Will Smith then says “pimp-smacking the shiznit,” despite the fact that this is the trailer for 2012’s Men in Black 3, not 2002’s Men in Black 2. The lead actors are introduced, Josh Brolin introduces a crazy unicycle-thing that one would think would still be around in a modified sense in the present day, a montage of action happens, and Will Smith sums up the plot (spoiler alert: they need to save the world). The trailer ends with a joke that Josh Brolin looks older than 29.

The main question that we all wanted answered from the trailer is if this movie is necessary. At least, personally, Men in Black 3 seemed like a worse idea than even Battleship (and this is coming from someone who’s excited for that Monopoly movie, if that ever comes to fruition), but with strong jokes and a logical extension of the Men in Black franchise, it could still be successful. The jokes, the trailer would make it seem, are just that Agent K isn’t emotive and that '60s culture is different than 2012 culture. Sure, there’s plenty of room for some good fish-out-of-water comedy, if it would have the courage to stray from Austin Powers territory. It doesn’t even have the courage for that. Outside of a scene at the Factory, you could forget, even, that it was the '60s. There’s so much plotting going on that requires so much from the screenplay that there isn’t room for any jokes. J and K have to get from A to B so many times for such thin and convenient reasons that the humor has to stick to the very obvious and uncomplicated (ha ha! Josh Brolin has “city miles” on him!).

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