Q: What’s the difference between Men In Black II the movie and the videogame?
A: The movie will only suck up 88 minutes of your life.
To be fair, there’s more to the movie than just picking up items and fighting bosses. Men In Black II also has lots and lots of make-up effects, a desperate air as it tries to remind you what worked about the first one, and a near complete ignorance of the same. But I’ll bet it makes one heck of a video game.
Strangely enough, it comes from the same team that made Men In Black, except for the writers. (The great Ed Solomon wrote the original, but I have no idea why he has no involvement in this one.) Though it would be easy to blame the script, both Barry Fanaro and Robert Gordon have written extremely funny films, Galaxy Quest and Kingpin, respectively. Instead, we should chalk it up to a team of actors and a director who just don’t want to be here, but the money was too good.
And oh, is that money in evidence. Where the original Men In Black headquarters had sleek, unbroken white walls, they’ve now done some expansion to allow in a Sprint PCS outlet and a Burger King so that villainess Serleena (Lara Flynn Boyle) can be shown eating a Whopper. Granted, the poor girl needs to eat a few more burgers, but does it make sense that a super-secret organization that wipes out all civilian memory of alien encounters would allow businesses to set up franchises within their super-secret headquarters? I guess they would if those businesses offered Sony a crapload of money to do cross-promotion.
That kind of careless thinking runs throughout the movie, sacrificing plot and sense to make cheap jokes. Sometimes it works. But more often than not, it just feels desperate, such as when Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) runs up against an alien called a Ballchinian. Read that slowly and guess what his main physical attribute is.
As for how the film manages to get the previously neuralized K back into action, it involves an object of unimaginable power that should not have been allowed to be hidden on Earth. Twenty-five years earlier, K tricked both alien uber-bitch Serleena and his superiors into believing that he had rejected Queen Lauranna’s entreaties, sending the object of conflict off-planet. When Serleena returns, knowing she had been tricked, Zed (Rip Torn) sends J (Will Smith) to retrieve K from his post office exile and bring back his memories. Unfortunately, K had neuralyzed himself into forgetting the incident, but not before leaving himself a set of clues to put it all back together should another crisis arise.
Until the two agents reunite, everyone acts like they’re just biding time, and the script forgets who the characters actually are. Cocksure J has morphed into an impatient type A personality, having neuralyzed a series of partners who didn’t measure up to the memory of K. (Keep in mind that he only worked with K for two days.) Patrick Warburton gets a quick appearance as J’s last partner, T, but before we can really get to know him, he’s dispatched. It’s only when K returns that J starts to resemble the character we knew before, but cocky has been replaced by near stupidity.
The movie sets up an interesting reversal of the roles, as it looks like J will have to re-teach the master everything. Jeebs (Tony Shalhoub) admits that his deneuralyzer is operating with buggy software, and that K will need time to reboot. But director Barry Sonnenfeld isn’t interested in things like character development or even real interaction, so he drops that possibility like a hot potato so that Smith and Jones can begin throwing one-liners at each other. But since both actors are now playing parodies of their characters from the first film, it all rings hollow.
Though the movie only picks up speed when Jones comes back onto the scene, Smith only seems alive when dealing with his interim partner, Agent F. In one of the few instances of a callback to the first film working, F turns out to be the little pug alien, Frank. Overexcited to be given active duty (and only given it because, as an alien, J is forbidden to neuralyze him), Frank steals every scene he’s in. He also allows for the funniest (and let’s hope last) use of “Who Let The Dogs Out?” in film.
As is obvious from Sprint commercials, the worm guys are back, too, but they’ve been placed on suspension for stealing from the duty free shop. J hides his new “girlfriend” Rita (Rosario Dawson) at their pad, where their basically phallic nature becomes thuddingly obvious. You will see no more disturbing sight in film this year than a worm guy pumping iron with a full-on crotch shot.
It all builds to nothing. Either Sonnenfeld has no clue how to pace a movie (regardless of its short length), or simply doesn’t care. If he hadn’t shepherded The Tick last season, I’d believe that he’s been replaced by an alien double himself. Every confrontation with a bad guy engenders no excitement whatsoever, including no fewer than three “deaths” for Serleena. Even the controversial climactic scene (now substituting the Statue of Liberty for the World Trade Center) is treated off-handedly. Maybe it’s supposed to be some sort of post-ironic irony, that it’s all in a day’s work for the Men In Black. But it should still be interesting for us to watch. The first film took itself seriously enough to be an adventure that was also very funny. This one gives just enough to convince us we might be watching something better than it actually is.
The biggest crime is the utter waste of Rosario Dawson. Her Rita witnesses the first alien murder, but unlike Linda Fiorentino’s Laurel, the character has no defined traits beyond being pretty. The script hints that she has some set but undefined career goal, but mostly, she’s there for the suddenly soulfully lonely J to instantly fall in love with her. Near the end, K ascribes a bunch of attributes to her, which she agrees are true, but we’ve never seen them at all. Maybe if we had, the movie’s central mystery would have been playing fairly with us.
Instead, this is one of those movies where they can’t actually show us anything; they can only talk about it. K has been vaulted to legendary status, and every Man In Black babbles on about how he was the greatest of them all. (By the way, nothing in the first film indicates this at all.)
And, again, MIIB reverses everything set up in the first movie. The neuralyzed K spends all his time looking at the stars with a curious longing, when originally he complained that they had lost all meaning for him. If you’ll recall, also, he was originally driven by that long-lost sweetheart, the only love of his life. Oops. That’s now not quite true, because he was in love with Queen Lauranna. The cheats aren’t as bad here as, say, Highlander II: The Quickening, but they’re still insulting.
But then, the filmmakers just don’t care, trusting that you won’t, either. Sure, they changed the ending so as not to bring up sad memories of the World Trade Center, but they left in street signs indicating that that’s exactly where J and K are headed.
Maybe you don’t care. Hey, it’s summer. If you just want to see the guys hurl semi-amusing insults, battle fairly interesting looking aliens, and save the world, again, then Men In Black II does the trick. It just doesn’t treat itself or the audience with anything resembling respect. It’s up to us to decide if we deserve it.
