Strong chemistry let down by a lame script
Men in Black: International
12A cert, 115 min Dir F. Gary Gray
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Kumail Nanjiani, Rafe Spall, Rebecca Ferguson
Men in Black: International doesn’t much care about being a Men in Black film, but did they ever? Since the original pairing of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, back in 1997, the franchise has never been invested in continuity or lore. It’s a wipe-clean operation, each movie only as good as the new ideas it flings out. Here, alas, is where the fourth instalment – the first to be directed not by Barry Sonnenfeld, but Straight Outta Compton’s F Gary Gray – falls down.
Thanks to the Avengers pow-wows, we know how Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson can spar. Foolproof chemistry, however, can’t overcome a hapless script. Hemsworth plays Agent H, a loose cannon in the alien police force. Thompson’s Molly, soon to be Agent M, has yearned to join their ranks since childhood. Thankfully, the male-dominated outfit still has one powerful woman: Emma Thompson’s veteran Agent O, who’s given a couple of weary exchanges about how old-hat the “Men in Black” concept feels. She
has a British counterpart, High T (Liam Neeson), and the film nearly draws up battle-lines between old boys’ axis and feminist duo, but thinks better of it.
Agent O, in fact, vanishes for an hour, so that the headline stars can buddy up in their curiously bromantic way. It makes you miss the affecting plot of Men in Black 3 (2012), with its time-travel back to Apollo 11; there’s nothing comparable here. Perhaps Agent H will be a successful bodyguard for an alien bigwig; perhaps Rebecca Ferguson’s intergalactic arms dealer will put the universe’s most powerful weaponry into the wrong hands. It’s difficult to care.
The vagueness about setting rings hollow as well. We keep racing past chain restaurants near St Paul’s. Agent M boards a special platform on the New York subway and is whisked to the London bureau; cool, but the “international” idea seems to begin and end there. The script can’t dig up a single urgent reason to put anyone anywhere.
Hemsworth falls back on his (considerable) default charm, playing a complacent hero who’s equal parts Han Solo and 007. The potential peaks early, when he’s fatally poisoned and an alien, possessing the only antidote, talks him into bed; more of his career as a cross-species gigolo would have been good. Neeson’s role has surely been abridged since the racism scandal in spring: he hangs around mutely while the story spins its wheels. All in all, we’re badly missing Tommy Lee Jones’s deadpan face, telling you with barely a flicker that you didn’t see what you clearly just saw.
There are compensations: Thompson has a handy air of wanting to get on with it, looking hot-to-trot in all the bits of business she’s given, while Kumail Nanjiani drums up comic verve as a titchy sidekick called Pawny, survivor of some baffling chessboard massacre. But the fundamental want of ideas keeps bringing Gray’s film to a standstill. You won’t need neuralysing to forget the whole thing after an hour or two has passed.