Men In Black

Despite the Revengers’ reunion, MIB: International tanked. But is the series running on empty, or just need a fresh spark?

Halfway through Men In Black: International, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson collapse into giggles while hunkered over a busted rocket-bike. Well, at least they had a laugh. For most of us, International pin-balled between locations with little sense of direction or comic fuel in its tank, despite its leads’ charisma.

Box-office figures and review aggregates concur. In the US, opening weekend takings ($30m) slumped by $20m-plus below previous series entries. Its Rotten Tomatoes score squats at 23 per cent, below fellow under-performer Godzilla: King Of The Monsters and level with X-Men: Dark Phoenix. The series-low global takings of MIB II ($441.8m) will surely be out of reach, let alone the series high of 2012’s MIB 3 ($624m). International might break records for the number of neuralyser puns crow-barred into reviews, but that’s your lot.

Don’t let those Godzilla/X-Men parallels tempt you into blaming franchise fatigue. Not all franchises are failing – and MIB 3 proved the series could survive partial recasting and work as critter-feature panto. Though flawed, it offered time-travel twists, Josh Brolin’s delicious Tommy Lee Jones

impression, Jemaine Clement’s lively villain, Michael Stuhlbarg’s clever alien and surprise flashes of emotion.

International’s main sell is the reunion of Thor: Ragnarok’s Revengers – which is fine until you realise how little Hemsworth (H) and Thompson (M) have to work with. Where earlier MIBs traded on the chafing chemistry between Will Smith’s maximalism and Jones’ dour minimalism, the contrasts between agents H&M aren’t heightened enough. The chemistry between them wilts.

It doesn’t help that the plotting is busy, or that prime comic weapon Kumail Nanjiani is reduced to a comic relief voice-role, or that the crucial straight-man/woman role (Rebecca Ferguson’s Riza) is merely a cameo. Nor does it help that International does little with the franchise’s fertile immigration subtexts, which could have merged with the newly globalised emphasis nicely. Whether that’s down to rumoured producer/director conflicts or more mundane failings is uncertain. Yet just as Liam Neeson’s High T declares that nothing “is unkillable with the proper voltage”, so the MIB franchise is – surely – revivable with the right voltage. It just needs to strike some sparks to get that bike flying again. KH