Men in Black II

2002 sequel

Rating: 10/20

Plot: An alien threat requires Will Smith to pull Tommy Lee Jones out of retirement and restore his memory.

I lost track of what was happening in this movie because I stopped caring. The best thing about this movie is Tommy Lee Jones, both as a post office employee oblivious of his former life and the grumpy Man in Black we knew from the first movie. He plays curmudgeonly as well as anybody, and his lines--with help from his delivery of those lines--are the funniest parts of this unfunny movie. Will Smith brings his usual charisma but just doesn't have a lot to work with here. I enjoy Rip Torn even if his character is a little too Tommy-Lee-Jonesish, and the ubiquitous Patrick Warburton is really the perfect actor to play a bumbling government official. Tony Shalhoub brings back his character from the first movie while David Cross plays, I think, a completely different guy.

I didn't care at all for Lara Flynn Boyle as the tentacled bad gal, Serleena. The tough apathy she plays the character with just feels like a cliche. And I really hated Johnny Knoxville in a dual role. He's annoying as both a big head and a little head, and he really overacts, trying to squeeze every drop of funny out of a script that just doesn't work at all. He's dreadfully bad.

The humor feels a little forced to me. Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart cameos are just odd, a gag about a "Ballchinnian" is just as funny as it is in Movie 43, and a beatbox-off between the Fresh Prince and Biz Markie seems out of place. There's a talking dog, of course, and that character is just as annoying as you think it would be. I enjoyed a line about nearly everybody who works in a post office being an alien, but it seems like an easy target. For a movie this cartoonish--I mean, Will Smith gets thrown all over the place, but nobody ever gets hurts--this really isn't that much fun. Any fun I might have been having was abducted when that stupid dog started singing "I Will Survive" and, about five minutes later, "Who Let the Dogs Out?" It seemed to be a lot of time to waste in a movie that was only about 90 minutes.

A lot of the problem is that the effects are terrible. Rick Baker does some alien work, and a lot of the alien design is creative and cool, but anytime CGI is used, it's pretty much a disaster. Look no further than a giant centipede thing in the subway during a big opening action sequence for proof. I'm fine with filmmakers being ambitious, but watching this subway scene and a lot of the other action sequences in the movie really took me out of the story. I understand it's all supposed to be cartoony anyway, but this stuff didn't even look as good as a cartoon.

I do like that there's a character named Dog Poop. Dog Poop's played by the late Sonny Tipton. I haven't checked any obituaries to see if "played Dog Poop in the popular film Men in Black II" made its way into any of them.

Oh, and I liked some of Danny Elfman's score.

I saw this because I have to watch the sequel for my Time Travel Movie Fest. I hope it's better than this one.