REVIEW: ‘Men in Black International’ can’t be bothered to save the series
Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth star in Men in Black International, directed by F. Gary Gray.
Watching the latest installment of the Men in Black franchise is a bit like watching a team of earnest kids playing T-ball. They have the ball set up in front of them, but continue to whiff past it, sometimes spinning all the way around while doing so. Occasionally one of the players will hit the ball, but it won’t go all that far. But we’ll let the kid run around the bases anyways.
The thing about a T-ball game is that at least it has cute kids and a low-stakes environment. Men in Black International, by contrast, is a movie made on a $110 million budget that should be a lot better than it is, considering the talent and franchise history involved. But the sequel opts to squander the chemistry (well-established in the Marvel movies) of its leads, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, and to give us very little reason to cheer on any further suited-up adventures.
In this outing, we say goodbye to alien-hunting Agent J (Will Smith) and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) and bring in Agents H (Hemsworth) and M (Thompson). M, known in her pre-initial days as Molly, is shown to be a whip-smart candidate for the FBI and the CIA, but she’s not interested in terrestrial security. She’s looking to join the MiB following an encounter with two agents when she was a child. After a series of events that is best summarized as “the plot needs her to become an agent, don’t worry about the details”, Molly is recruited and sent to London for her first assignment.
Liam Neeson as the head of the London branch, an agent called High T.
There, she crosses paths with star agent H, and soon finds herself in a fight against both an invading alien race called the Hive, and against an apparent mole inside the London branch of the MiB. Cue some of the titular international travel, the MiB chestnut of human characters revealing themselves to be aliens, and some shiny guns.
If this all sounds warmed-over, that’s because it is. The key ingredient of the original film is the relationship between J and K: one an over-confident, rule-eschewing newbie, the other a grizzled veteran. Even though the screenwriters try to fit Hemsworth and Thompson into a similar dynamic, their characters are paper-thin by comparison. H is described by other characters as having lost his touch after a bad breakup, but we never learn the truth of that relationship, or any other distinguishing characteristic other than that he’s a playboy. M, meanwhile, claims to have cast off any plans for a life outside MiB and talks about having no interest in romance, but the movie does nothing with that idea other than cram it into dialogue.
The villains for the better part of the movie are a pair of alien twins with - I kid you not - breakdancing powers. They’re able to melt and transform matter with their moves, and while visually, their design seems inspired, they end up being inconsequential to the overall story. Meanwhile, the traitor-inside-MiB thread is clumsily structured; the identity of the mole is painfully obvious almost from the opening scenes, and yet the heroes rush through solving the mystery in the final 15 minutes.
Kumail Nanjiani voices a tiny solider-like alien.
A dim bright spot in the movie is the supporting cast, namely Rebecca Ferguson as a weapons dealer and Kumail Nanjiani as the voice of a miniature alien soldier. But even their talents are sort of wasted; aside from a brief fight scene with Thompson, Ferguson’s character doesn’t seem nearly as frightening as the movie claims. Nanjiani’s character gets the best banter, but I wanted him to be a lot more manic and unpredictable than he turns out to be.
The Men in Black movies are meant to be action-comedies; maybe this is one of the reasons for Sony’s still-baffling idea to do an MiB-Jump Street crossover. But if you measure a movie’s success in this genre based on the ratio of laughs to thrills, Men in Black International comes up lacking in both areas. It’s also telling that the movie fails to take advantage of the lowest-hanging comedic fruit: poking fun at the name of the organization (and franchise) while Tessa Thompson is one of the leads. The fact that both jokes on this topic are delivered with a hand-waving, dismissive attitude is all you need to know. This is a franchise that simply can’t be bothered to live up to the original film, or to set a new tone for a new generation.
Men (and Women?) in Black International gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
The recurring “celebrities who are secretly aliens” gag seemed particularly weak in this installment.
I can’t stop wondering about the codenames for all the other Men in Black agents who missed out on one of the 26 alphabet designations.
Is there any other reason (besides the plot) that Agent O sends M on a mission to uncover a possible mole inside the organization when she’s just on probation?