‘Men in Black’ reboot fun but instantly forgettable
Would any fictional gadget be more coveted by Hollywood executives than the memory-erasing “Men in Black” neuralyzer?
Imagine the lucrative benefits of being able to, with a single flash, make moviegoers forget the film they just saw. Franchises would be endlessly renewable.
Instead, we get film series perpetuated beyond their natural end with the hope that you remember them enough to get you in the door but not enough that you’re much bothered by regurgitated storylines.
Tobehonest,idon’trecall much from the first three “Men in Black” films, all by Barry Sonnenfeld, except the original’s light wit, the fine chemistry between stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones and the likable premise that aliens walk among us.
The new “Men in Black: International,” directed by F. Gary Gray, is the fourth film in the franchise and one of those reboot-sequelspinoff hybrids. Exactly how it connects to the previous three movies is clear, perhaps, only to its makers.
Subbing for Smith and Jones are Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth, who already tried out their rapport in “Thor: Ragnarok.”
Themovieis, unsurprisingly, a pale reflection of the first “Men in Black.” It’s bland and nearly neuralyzer-level forgettable. Its target market (international) is right there in the title.
But it has a few things going for it. In the 22 years since the original, the fate of the world has, at the multiplex, hung in the balance roughly a billion times. But I still prefer the “Men in Black” mode of impending Armageddon to the more self-serious superhero rescues. Here, it’s routine, nothing much to worry about. The end of the world is a breeze.
I also can’t get my ire up too much at a film that gives ample room for Thompson and Hemsworth to be what they are: top-notch movie stars.
Thompson plays Molly, a young paranoid who has been on the lookout for alien life-forms since she was visited by a cuddly extraterrestrial as a child and managed to elude the neuralyzer. Through cunning and pluck, she tracks down a Men in Black headquarters and talks her wayintoajob.
An eager new recruit, dubbed Agent M, Molly quickly partners with one of the agency’s top men, Agent H (Hemsworth), the most trusted agent of the organization overseen by High T (Liam Neeson).
But the Men in Black have a mole, they soon learn, and a strange new shapeshifting foe presently in the form of Laurent and Larry Bourgeois. For anyone who’s seen Beyoncé’s “Homecoming,” the dancing identical twins are suitably out-of-this-world. They are lethal emissaries for an intergalactic force known as the Hive.
The action skips around from Paris to London to Marrakech, but the film gets a comic lift when Kumail Nanjiani enters as the voice of a strange little chessboard creature named Pawny who pledges his devotion to Agent M.
The plotting is clunky and haphazard. But when together, Thompson, Hemsworth and Nanjiani turn “Men In Black: International” into something funny and silly and pleasant enough.