Subject: Retrospective: Men in Black (1997)

From: [email-masked]
Date: 13 May 2000 00:18:41 GMT

Men in Black almost makes one wish for an old Abbott and Costello Meet
Whoever flick. Whatever one's opinion about A&C, at least they had some
chemistry. In Men in Black, Will Smith knocks off one improv routine
after another, and Tommy Lee Jones stands frozen, waiting to deliver his
next line. The two of them hardly even seem to be in the same scene.

The best movie comedy has always been simple, but Men in Black takes the
Blues Brothers approach, thinking that $80 million and a couple of guys
in cool sunglasses ought to garner sufficient laughs. Smith and Jones
spend an awful lot of time reacting to blank screens waiting to be
filled in by the visual effects guys, and an even awfuller lot of time
is filled with exploding spaceships that look like outtakes from Plan 9
from Outer Space.

The plot is based on a popular comic book (What isn't these days?) about
the ultimate alien immigration service--in this case, the aliens are
from "out there," not the U.S. border. Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) needs a
partner, and after a sadly unfunny induction scene, he chooses New York
cop James Edwards (Will Smith, his role cribbed from Beverly Hills Cop),
who is dubbed Agent J.

Supposedly, New York is routinely filled with aliens, which is fine with
K as long as things don't get out of hand. But a bug in human disguise
(Vincent D'Onofrio) starts killing off alien royalty and tries to hijack
Earth, and of course it's up to J and K to stop him.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld ought to be the right choice for this
material, having put offbeat characters through their paces in the
Addams Family movies and Get Shorty. But the movie is so far removed
from the human element as to be off-putting. Sonnenfeld has always been
a sucker for wild point-of-view shots (he began as a cinematographer on
Raising Arizona), but here he really uses up his quota. Someone should
take his camera and nail it to the floor for a while.

And the movie is unusually mean-spirited and repulsive. One of the
alien's victims is a backwater wife whose husband's body was stolen to
provide human cover for the alien bug. So this gives Will Smith license
to do a riff on the woman's trashy lifestyle. And D'Onofrio, as the bug
in question, develops so many tics that he becomes painful to watch.
(Sonnenfeld seems to find deteriorating human flesh a huge laugh-getter.
Sorry, it didn't work in An American Werewolf in London, either.)

Jones and Rip Torn, normally a couple of great actors, are reduced to
standing around looking at giant monitors as though they were extras on
"Star Trek." Tony Shalhoub (of TV's "Wings") is so effects-laden, he
hardly gets a chance to show whether or not he can act. And Linda
Fiorentino has that thankless sci-fi role, the brilliant female doctor
who's there mainly to display her shapely legs.

As for Will Smith, I admit that people around me were guffawing at his
one-liners, but for me, his act is strictly second-rate Eddie Murphy.
And a couple of his more racially oriented remarks would probably cause
riots in the theaters if they were uttered by a Caucasian.

The movie's most-used joke is Agent K's "neuralyzer"--a weapon that
shoots a beam of light which causes people to forget that they just saw
an alien life form. There ought to be men with neuralyzers stationed in
the theater lobby after every showing of Men in Black.

Men in Black is rated PG-13 for frequent profanity and graphic scenes of
murder and explosions.

Submitted by: Steven Bailey
http://pages.hotbot.com/movies/skad13

Steven Bailey, a movie reviewer for The Beaches Leader newspaper in
Jacksonville Beach, Florida, has movie reviews posted in The Internet
Movie Database at:
http://www.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Steven+Bailey

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