DIRECTOR
Barry Sonnenfeld
SCREENWRITERS
Robert Gordon
Barry Fanaro
based
on characters created by
Lowell Cunningham
PRODUCERS
Laurie MacDonald
Walter F. Parkes
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Greg Gardiner
MUSIC
Danny Elfman
EDITORS
Richard Pearson
Steven Weisberg
CAST
Tommy Lee Jones (Agent K)
Will Smith (Agent J)
Lara Flynn Boyle (Serleena)
Rip Torn (Chief Z)
Rosario Dawson (Rita)
Patrick Warburton (Agent T)
Paige Brooks (Laranna)
David Cross (Newton)
Michael Jackson (Undercover officer)
Johnny Knoxville (Scard/Charlie)
Biz Markie (Beat Box Alien)
Tony Shalhoub (Jeebs)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 88m
U.S. release: July 3, 2002
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Barry
Sonnenfeld movies
reviewed on this site:
- Big Trouble
- Men
in Black
- Wild Wild West
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In Men in Black II
-- directed, like the first
one, by the once-promising Barry Sonnenfeld -- the hard-bitten
Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) and the eager rookie Agent J (Will
Smith) have switched places. K, having been "neuralyzed"
at the end of the first film to erase his memories of the MIB
program, is brought back into the fray by J, who now has five
years of experience under his belt. Jones' bafflement -- he's
been working in a Cape Cod post office -- plays nicely against
Smith's quiet eye-rolls of exasperation. When K gets deneuralyzed,
though, the dynamic goes back to that of the 1997 original. So
does everything else.
Apart from one unaccountably
daffy scene involving a village of tiny aliens who have been
living in K's abandoned locker and worshipping his wristwatch,
MIIB (as the ads have it) is about the most uninspired
rehash of a popular hit I've ever seen. On the principle that
the only thing the original lacked was a babelicious villain,
Sonnenfeld and writers Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro order up
a vicious alien, Serleena, who wants to find some bracelet and
conquer the world; and in the person of Lara Flynn Boyle, she
looks so gaunt that when the movie stoops to a barfing joke (Serleena
devours a male attacker, then notices her sudden tummy bulge
and vomits him back up) it comes off like an anorexia joke in
the worst taste.
It's undeniably fun to see
Tommy Lee Jones as an amiable, harmless postal worker named Kevin
Brown pre-deneuralyzation. As usual, he sneaks dry volumes of
wit into his crisp monotone. He's doing this in the same what-the-hell,
pass-the-paycheck mood in which he did Batman
Forever. Will Smith, on the other hand, seems to be coming
down with Eddie Murphy disease. He may feel he's beyond the honking
little aliens now, and maybe he is -- in the five years since
MIB, he's been nominated for an Oscar. But oddly, this
one-time comedian doesn't give himself to the goofiness the way
Jones -- who spent most of his career being as serious
as cancer -- can. If I'm not mistaken, there's a touch of sullenness
in Smith's work here: "Y'all didn't come out for Ali
-- you only like me in shit like this."
The sullenness could extend
to Smith's director. Has Barry Sonnenfeld lost his mind? Certainly
he no longer has any grasp of humor or even rudimentary entertainment.
There's one decent moment of simple slapstick when Smith fumbles
his way down a pile of inflatable tubes -- the comically static
staging recalls his bit in the original with the table scraping
loudly across the floor. But for the most part Sonnenfeld just
points his camera at non-existent CGI beasts to be added later.
Bringing back Tony Shalhoub as a shady alien dealer doesn't help;
neither does recruiting Johnny Knoxville as a never-funny two-headed
alien in cahoots with Serleena. More than once, the neuralyzed
K is said to be "in neutral"; so is Sonnenfeld. Why
is he doing these movies? Wild Wild West, Big Trouble, now this -- he doesn't bring
anything to them except exhaustion and desperation.
And perhaps greed. Everyone
involved in MIIB knows it's a surefire July 4 hit; it
will own its weekend and make everyone bankable again. It may
seem naïve to point that out; but this sequel, more than
any other in recent memory (you'd probably have to go back to
Beverly
Hills Cop III for an equally soulless, cynical and laughless
"comedy" sequel), seems only in it for the money. (Hell,
even the embarrassing Attack
of the Clones at least emerged from George Lucas' highly
specific vision, inane as that vision often is.) We get the same
gross-outs, the same bellowing monsters, the same chattering
little worms, the same heads exploding in sticky guck. MIIB
seems to want to neuralyze the audience: it wants the original
movie's fans to remember that film enough to remember that they
liked it and want more, but it wants them to forget it enough
so that they don't realize they're not getting more. They're
not even getting the-same-only-different; they're getting the-same-only-more-same.
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