MEN IN BLACK
A film review by Chris Casino
*** out of **** (Worthwhile)
CAST: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Fiorentino, Vincent D'Nofrio, Carol Struyken, Rip Torn.
I never liked Will Smith as the Fresh Prince, his show was likable but that wasn't his doing. As an actor, however, I admire and respect this man, and MEN IN BLACK makes me admire and respect him more.
I'd seen Will Smith on Jay Leno the night before I saw it. He told you not to go in expecting INDEPENDENCE DAY II, which is what people may expect when they go in to see this, and admittedly, I'd gone into the theater expecting it, thinking,"Jay Leno likes Dennis Rodman, so how often is he right?" But this is not INDEPENDENCE DAY II, it's very different, and that's what's so appealing about it.
Don't get me wrong, I was part of the half of the country that loved ID4, but the appeal of this film is that Will Smith choses a different type of alien movie here and doesn't *entirely* typecast himself, and that shows he's good at picking scripts.
Smith plays Agent Jay, a young MIB recruited by Agent Kay (an impressive Tommy Lee Jones, who works surprisingly well with Smith), a grizzled MIB who's fought aliens of all shapes and sizes. Anyhow, the plot deals with a giant bug-like alien (D'Nofrio) who comes to Earth in human form and possesses a farmer in search of a device which is the key to universal peace. Used in his hands, it can be a weapon that will destroy Earth in a certain amount of time, unless Jay and Kay recover it, with the help of a female Doctor (Fiorentino).
This movie tries a lot of different stuff, comedy, SF, and buddy cop movie stuff, all three of which work well. It mostly concentrates on the buddy cop relationship between Smith and Jones, and that's why this movie treats itself like a buddy cop action movie, but it also deals with our fears about weird people that we don't know about. It explores the theory,"What if all the weird people you know are aliens?" Case in point, when Fiorentino says to Smith at the end,"The Emperor of Allariua wants tickets to the Bulls game," he replies,"Let's put in some calls to Dennis Rodman, he's from that planet." If *that* guy wouldn't pass as an alien, I dunno who would!
So if you refuse to see this movie because it's another alien movie with Smith and you hated ID4 to begin with, give it a shot, it deserves it, it's worth it, and it's very different.
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