DIRECTOR
Barry Sonnenfeld
SCREENWRITER
Ed Solomon
based
on characters created by
Lowell Cunningham
PRODUCERS
Laurie MacDonald
Walter F. Parkes
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Don Peterman
MUSIC
Danny Elfman
EDITOR
Jim Miller
CAST
Tommy Lee Jones (Agent K)
Will Smith (Agent J)
Linda Fiorentino (Laurel Weaver)
Vincent D'Onofrio (Edgar)
Rip Torn (Chief Z)
Tony Shalhoub (Jack Jeebs)
Siobhan Fallon (Beatrice)
Carel Struycken (Arquillan)
David Cross (Morgue Attendant)
Tim Blaney (Frank the Pug, voice)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 98m
U.S. release: July 2, 1997
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Barry
Sonnenfeld movies
reviewed on this site:
- Big Trouble
- Men
in Black II
- Wild Wild West
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For
the second July in a row, Will Smith stares out at us from the
cover of Newsweek, selling an overhyped movie about aliens.
Underneath his picture -- he's posing with co-star Tommy Lee
Jones -- is a blurb anointing Men in Black "the summer's
coolest, funniest movie." Cooler than Face/Off?
Funnier than Hercules? If Newsweek says it's so,
then it must be so. This is margarita hype -- best taken with
many grains of salt. If only Newsweek's bouquet
were the only one being thrown.
Men in Black is the chosen movie of the season -- the
darling of punch-drunk critics battered by the grinding idiocy
of Speed
2, the hollow glitz of Batman
and Robin, the crude pyrotechnics of Con
Air. There's a touching element of wishful thinking in
the reviews I've read; the movie is directed by Barry Sonnenfeld,
the former cinematographer (Raising
Arizona) who went on to make the Addams Family
movies and Get Shorty, and perhaps these critics want
very badly to believe that his new film is witty, hip, inventive
-- everything it isn't.
The movie is far from bad. Tommy Lee Jones, as a hard-bitten
government agent who keeps an eye on aliens living in Manhattan,
gives his patented four-D performance -- detached, dry, deadpan,
droll -- but he's great at it, and the movie gains from having
an actor of his gravity in such absurd situations (as Volcano
did). Will Smith, as the hot-shot New York cop whom Jones recruits
as a new Man in Black, has the film's funniest moment, which
has nothing to do with aliens. Filling out forms along with several
other candidates, Smith gets tired of writing with the pages
propped up in his lap; finally, he drags over a heavy table to
write on, making enough noise to wake the dead.
Given its director and stars, Men in Black should have
been a wacko classic to put alongside Ghostbusters and
The Hidden (this movie's basic parents). But the script,
adapted by Ed Solomon (the Bill & Ted movies) from
a comic book, betrays its shallow origins. The story is just
a collection of sketches in which Jones and Smith run into farcical
E.T.s. In the main plot, they're on the trail of an evil "bug"
that's inhabited the skin of a farmer (Vincent D'Onofrio). After
about the fifth repetition, the sight gag of D'Onofrio staggering
around the streets like a spastic Dawn of the Dead reject
wears very thin.
The aliens are rubbery and goofy and often repulsive, forever
gushing blue slime or translucent puke. Men in Black seems
calculated to go over big with ten-year-old boys; it also features
a rocket-fast car and huge, bulbous weapons -- except for Smith's
"noisy cricket," a tiny gun that packs a megaton wallop.
Once, that's kind of funny. Four times, no.
Somewhere in the margins of the movie, Linda Fiorentino turns
up as a lonely, antisocial coroner ("I hate the living"),
and the film ends with the promise of a Woman in Black -- an
idea that makes Men in Black seem like the prequel to
a more intriguing comedy. Smart and reserved, Fiorentino is the
most memorable human on the screen -- perhaps because Barry Sonnenfeld,
who doesn't seem all that interested in this material,
shares her alienation from the boys-with-toys hijinks. So did
I. |