MEN IN BLACK
A film review by James McGowan
Copyright 1997 James McGowan
I had the pleasure of seing Men In Black last night at a press screening. First, if there's justice in this world, MIB should blow every summer release out of the water (not a thinly veiled reference to that execrable waste of celluloid, Speed 2, or to the upcoming Titanic). Second, it's great to see some imagination to go along with great special effects for a change!
The story line is cute, and does a great job of twisting popular perspectives on such things as the tabloid press and government conspiracies. Jones is his usual gruff, lovable self as a seasoned "man in black". Smith is terrific as a befuddled inductee to the MIB organization. My personal favorite (and obviously the audience's) was Vincent DiOnofrio as, well, a loathsome human who gets hijacked by an even more loathsome alien. His spastic body English had me in hysterics from beginning to end.
In short, MIB is hysterically funny, with lots of witty dialog and beautifully rendered sight gags. If you could combine Terminator 2 with Beetlejuice, you'd have a rough approximation of what I mean. I'll stop here and just advise that you get in line on opening night. What a blast!
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews