MEN IN BLACK INTERNATIONAL by Urizen

   Here come the Men in Black! I have gone back and forth on this franchise’s future for years now. Rumors and plans have been thrown around for a while, including a weird 21 Jump Street crossover (dodged a bullet there), yet nothing had really came to fruition until recently when we got the announcement for Men In Black International. My hope continued to grow more and more as it was announced that Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth would be starring in it. The two worked great together in Thor Ragnarok and both are great at acting, so it had to be good. As the trailer came out, it seemed like an interesting twist, but also kept the same feel of the original series. As usual though, the reviews came, and I grew worried. I didn’t know what I was getting into.

   Men In Black: International deals with Thompson's Agent M, who as a child rescued an alien that had broken into her house while being chased by the MIB. While her parents got neuralized and forgot the incident, everyone thought she had been asleep, causing M to not endure the same fate. This event leads to M becoming obsessed with aliens and the MIB. Working for around 20 years, she researches aliens and does her best to find the headquarters of the organization. M even goes as far as to isolate herself from the possibility of love so that it doesn’t interfere with her goal.

  M’s efforts pay off one day though when she tracks down the organization and after some convincing, gets allowed to be a probationary agent. Getting sent to the London branch for her first mission, M gets paired with Hemsworth’s Agent H. Agent H is a bit of a slacker and partier. He is carefree, reckless and works alone. Agent H is a bit of a hero in the MIB though as he and High T (Liam Neeson), the head of the London Branch, once saved the world from the evil Hive with only their wits and series 7 de-atomizers. The two agents must work together to stop the villainous Hive that are once again trying to take over.

  I had originally walked out of the movie with pretty positive thoughts. While not thinking it was perfect, I found it to be a pretty fun, enjoyable movie. Now after it has been a day since seeing it, I look back and realize that while I still find it enjoyable and decent, it was sadly pretty underwhelming and forgettable. Nothing much stands out to me. It is a bit of a shame. Even the jokes while pretty okay, never really made me burst out laughing. I got a bit of a chuckle, but it didn’t get me the same way the first one did.

   Breaking it down a bit though, the acting was good. Hemsworth and Thompson both have good chemistry in this as they did before. The two play off each other well with Thompson playing a bit of the straight man role and Hemsworth as the funny man. Usually in cases like this, where it is a buddy cop type scenario, it has a little bit of a lesson where one learns to loosen up and the other needs to get a bit stricter. This sadly doesn’t have that. M sort of starts to let herself love as she develops feelings for H. Agent H sort of gets a bit more serious, but not quite. Neither really have any big revelations or have any changes. They go through arcs, but the arcs are just for the story to progress.

   With that, I don’t like even having a bit of a love interest with them at all. A big thing that bugs me is that I think it really takes away a lot when you can’t have two characters of the opposite sex and  they develop a relationship. It would have been so great to have them be best friends without any of the attraction. It sets things back a bit, and while it wasn’t done terribly in this, it annoyed me that it even happened.

   The aliens are all pretty cool. We get cameos of characters from the original series, including Frank. Frank is all that matters. Pawny (Kumail Nanjiani) was pretty cool. I liked the idea of that whole race. They had a chess theme and seemed cool, especially the queen. Plus Pawny got probably the most laughs out of me. He was truly funny, of course Kumail Nanjiani usually is. The alien twins though had some of the coolest designs in my opinion. When in their actual alien form, they looked like galaxies in the shape of humans.  While in their human forms, they were played by dancers Les Twins who did an awesome job. I really wanted more from them. They were powerful, they looked awesome, and were pretty threatening. It is a shame that more wasn’t given about them.

   Speaking of looking cool though, as is usual for Men in Black, the weapons and cars were great. Everything has this nice sleek design and I can’t think of anything that didn’t work for me as far as that goes. On the other side of that though, we do have the not so great alien goop monsters so, kind of balanced out?

   Something that I hated also was how rushed this movie’s beginning was.  We know that M was tracking the MIB. We hear her get praised for her abilities and how smart she is, but we never see how this happened.  I know I’m often all for ignoring previous incarnations of a story, but this is definitely a follow up to the original series. In those movies, we saw how J would be good for the organization.  We got time to get go know his character,  see his motivations. In this, we are told M is smart and talented.  We are told she is trying to track down the MIB, and while we do get told a bit of why, we are never shown this really. We don't even get to see her training and the process of fully getting accepted in this.  We are shown on a graph that on week one of training she did excellent and on week two she did excellent,  then all of a sudden she is getting measured for a suit and getting her firearm. 

   The same really applies to H. We are constantly told throughout the movie that he has changed. We never see this though.  We don't know how he was beforehand.  We only see him as he is now for the most part. Only time we get a flashback, he honestly still seems the same,  a reckless person. By the end of the film, it isn't like he has this big revelation and becomes better,  he still stays this carefree,  reckless,  wisecracking guy. It falls into the show-don’t-tell situation.  You can say all of these things about these characters,  but if you don't show anything to back it up, it means nothing. 

   In the end,  this movie is very predictably unpredictable.  You know there's a twist or two and you know that they are going to pull a fakeout but then another fakeout, and ultimately you will still probably figure out early on enough where this movie is going. Characters have all of the buddy cop clichés but without going anywhere.  Character “arcs" only exist to move the plot forward, a plot that leaves a lot of loose threads and has some underwhelming payoffs. There is no Will Smith music video.  All in all, it is just an okay movie. Not in “so bad that it's good" territory,  but also not so terribly bad that I hated every second of it. It was just okay. I don't recommend paying full price for it,  but if you can watch it pretty cheaply or if they come out with a collection of all of the movies,  you might get a bit of enjoyment and a few laughs.  Did I wish I was neuralized after seeing it? No, but I do wish it got the treatment it deserved, because at the end of the day, you probably wouldn't even need to be neuralized to forget this movie