You can tell, right off the bat, that there’s a problem with Men In Black International (MIB:I) from the way the movie opens. We get a flashback scene of the two MIB:I agents H (Chris Hemsworth) and High T (Liam Neeson) fighting aliens at the Eifel Tower in Paris. After watching this sequence--which falls flat with lame humor--we then flashback even further, to when a young Molly (Mandeiya Flory) watches her parents get zapped into forgetting their alien encounter by two MIB agents. But Molly herself retains her memory, and when she grows up (her adult role taken over by Tessa Thompson), she begins a rabid search for this mysterious organization, until the day she finds them and tries to bluff her way into their headquarters.
Personally, I felt that MIB:I would have been a much more enjoyable movie had they begun it with little Molly watching her parents get zapped, and continued onward from just her POV. Just show us the fleeting glimpses of the MIB organization that Molly sees, until she becomes an agent herself--that might have been a better way to re-introduce the MIB franchise to a new generation of viewers. But as it stands, with the silly opening in Paris, the introduction of the MIB universe is squandered in favor of cheap laughs, which is what a lot of big-budget Hollywood movies strive for these days (and wind up falling flat on their face at the box office; this was the financial fate that MIB:I suffered, as well).
Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson both co-starred in Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame, where they’ve proven to have on-screen chemistry. And yet that same chemistry to nowhere to be seen here in MIB:I. In fact, Hemsworth plays his Agent H with such slack-jawed incompetence that Agent M, eager to impress her new employers, seemed annoyed just to be seen with him. In the original MIB trilogy, Will Smith proved that he could play comedy without coming off as a total buffoon (and even when he was a buffoon, Smith was still sympathetic). But instead of being presented as being efficient agents, both Agent H and M seem like they’re ineptly surviving one calamity after another in this movie.
Another problem with MIB:I is the villains. There’s no real central villain, with the movie changing through one bad guy after another while trying desperately to be a mystery of sorts--yet the writing just isn’t strong enough to support this kind of story line, so it winds up being a half-hearted mystery with action scenes that you can’t take too seriously because God knows the movie doesn’t want you to. MIB:I is all over the place in terms of tone: it tries to be a comedy while trying to get the viewer to still take its threats seriously. And in the end, it’s such a mess that MIB:I winds up pleasing nobody. Oh well, at least we still have the original MIB films. --SF
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