Men in Black is a really good idea for a summer movie. First, it rides the crest of the X-Files/Roswell mystique, letting their publicity sell the film. Conflicts with aliens means space ships, explosions, and creature special effects, perfect for summer repeat business. Add the cachet of a graphic novel `comic book,' and you have an off-the-rack winner. Mercifully, this property fell into the right hands (Spielberg's Amblin), and didn't end up in the Hollywood sausage grinder. Barry Sonnenfeld was a good choice as director. He had previously done the Addams Family movies and Get Shorty. These films had their own peculiar attitude as their primary strength, and Barry delivered them to the screen intact. MIB has its own ‘tude, helped along by those box office titans..Smith and Jones?
I wonder if the generic nature of the stars' names is a mere coincidence, given that they play imperturbable, implacable cyphers. Fact is, Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith both bring a lot of talent and charisma to their roles. Will Smith showed us his action/humor chops in ID4, and he solidifies his ascendency here. Tommy doing comedy is a surprise to some, but I don't know why. Comedy acting requires a conviction to the story, letting the comedy come from the material, not the actor's manner. Check out Tommy's Oscar-nominated turn in JFK, and Oscar-winning role in The Fugitive.
Will plays a NYPD cop who falls down the rabbit-hole, into the super-secret world of the MIB. These guys police the traffic of hundreds of otherworld aliens that live here amongst us, and MIB hides them from the locals. Earth is sort of a neutral port: `Think of the movie Casablanca,' Jones tells Will, `without the Nazis.' Jones becomes Will's partner/mentor, dead serious as an MIB, but he betrays a capricious sense of humor in the way he tosses Will into mind-blowing situations. Tommy and boss Rip Torn never blink an eye as they matter-of-factly discuss the latest end-of-Earth scenario. Their un-sensationalistic manner is the implicit smirk that gives the movie its charm. It gives contrast to Will's comic takes, as he and the audience find out that Sly Stallone and Newt Gingrich, among others, are really aliens (Elvis, too). And the MIB agency is autonomous, getting funding from its patents on such borrowed alien technology as Velcro.
The main bug hunt involves an assassin sent to Earth to kill alien royalty and capture a bauble he is guarding. Vincent D'Onofrio has a great time playing the assassin, struggling to move about in the skin of a farmer, who didn't look too good before the bug killed him. Imagine: Terminator meets My Left Foot. As bodies pile up, they end in the morgue, where Linda Fiorentino plays a coroner, puzzled by cadavers that only appear to be human. Not the first time for her, but prior occasions have been wiped from her memory by the neuralyzer, an MIB device that erases the recent memories of people who witness alien events. This little doodad gets a real workout in the MIB's normal day, and it gets to be an anticipated punchline as the squares get corraled toward the end of a scene.
Further humor ensues when Will lobbies Tommy not to use the neuralyzer on the coroner yet again, fearing repeated use could be harmful. Actually, he's kind of attracted to her, what with her being Linda Fiorentino, and he doesn't want her to forget him, again. Turns out that she unknowingly has possession of the aforementioned bauble, so she ends up drawn into a Kong-scales-the-Empire-State-Building ending anyway. Not to worry. The bug is stopped, Earth is saved, and all elements are in place for MIB II.
Men in Black delivers, probably better than any summer movie for this year. The talented Smith and Jones boys solidify their box office appeal, and Sonnenfeld answers the question `Who you gonna call?' for offbeat stories that need a sympathetic director. Creature-meister Rick Baker and Industrial Lights and Magic did their usual superlative job. Betcha can't see it just once.
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