Men In Black International -- a review

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

Comments

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...

Presence -- A Review

Presence, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out Of Sight ), is based on his real life experiences with what he believes is a ghost in his own home. Inspired by his spectral roommate, Soderbergh wrote a few pages of a script, which he handed to David Koepp ( Panic Room, Jurassic Park ), who finished it. The film was shot in a house in Crandall, New Jersey, over just eleven days in September 2023 (they received an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement during the strike that year). Soderbergh shot this in the ‘found footage’ style, using only one camera, with himself as the camera operator. The result is that Presence is a haunted house story that is told from the point of view of the ghost. And it’s marvelous. But instead of the typical ’found footage’ movie, which is supposed to be culled together from film or video that is literally found after the fact, we see everything that’s happening in this house through the ‘eye...

Cleaner -- a review

In Cleaner Daisy Ridley ( Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) stars as Joanna “Joey” Locke, a window cleaner at a swanky London office building that serves as the headquarters for an energy company. Joey becomes late for work when she’s forced to take her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) to her job with her. Because of her lateness, her nimrod of a manager makes Joey work an hour late, well into the evening. Joey reluctantly keeps cleaning windows of bird splatter in the darkness, but eventually bird droppings wind up being the least of her problems. A team of terrorists arrive at a party that’s being held at the office for the energy company’s share holders. Disguised as performers, the terrorists seize the energy company’s board members as hostages, while knocking everybody else out with gas. Joey, still working on the windows outside, sees all of this and promptly goes into action. Because, as the film has earlier established, Joey is a former Britis...

The View From The Mountain

Search This Blog