Today marks the 20th
Anniversary of the one of the greatest sci-fi comedies ever made. Today, I will
do a review on the trilogy, which happens to be one of my favorite sci-fi
comedy trilogies ever made. Let’s jump right in to the first installment, “Men in
Black,” released in 1997.
There is a moment in
the movie when a serious government worker shows a video screen of “every alien
on Earth.” We’re not really surprised to see some of the faces on screen:
Sylvester Stallone, Al Roker, Newt Gingrich, and Dionne Warwick. (Ebert said in
his review, “When the movie comes out on video, I'll use freeze frames to
capture the rest.”) Funny little side jokes like that are the heart and soul of
“Men in Black” (Ebert noted, “or "MiB," as it is already being
called, no doubt in the movie title-as-software tradition of "ID4"”).
Ebert noted, “A lot of
big-budget special-effects films are a hair this side of self-parody and don't
know it.” “Men in Black” knows it and enjoys it. It’s an enjoyable Bronx look
aimed at movies that think $100 million budgets are seriousness. Ebert
mentioned, “This is not a film about superheroes, but the adventures of a
couple of hard-working functionaries whose assignment is to keep tabs on the
sizable alien population of the United States.”
Tommy Lee Jones, never
more serious, not smiling and businesslike, stars as K, the veteran agent of
Division 6, whose members dress, as Ebert puts it, “William Morris agents used
to,” in black suits and black ties. The agency is under the command of Zed (Rip
Torn), who gets really serious at the latest threat to Earth’s independence and
tasks K a young rookie code-named J (Will Smith).
Their main threat comes
along when a flying saucer hits the truck of a hillbilly named Edgar, played
Vincent D’Onofrio, and the alien inside takes his body, not really comfortably.
Ebert describes, “Imagine Orson Welles in a suit of armor and you will have a
rough approximation of how easily the Edgar-alien inhabits his skin.”
The recurring joke in the
movie is that almost anyone could be an alien. The film starts on the Mexican border,
where Jones pulls over a group of officers (Fredric Lehne, Steve Rankin, Andy
Prosky, Stephanie Paliferro and Robert Stahoviak) who have caught some illegal
immigrants and picks out the one who is really an alien: a fantastical, blobby
bug-eyed alien with a realistic human face mask (John Alexander).
The special effects are
by Industrial Light and Magic, and the aliens are by Rick Baker, perhaps
Hollywood’s greatest monster creator. Here he goes completely nuts. Instead of
being told to make one alien race, he’s been told to create an entire galaxy
race, and every one is a new surprise. Ebert made a funny remark saying, “There
were times I thought we were seeing the new seven dwarfs: Slimy, Gooey, Icky,
Creepy, Sticky, Barfy and Pox.”
The story (Ebert said, “If
there can be said to be one, and if I understood it”) tells of a plan by
"Edgar" to somehow use a captured galaxy to take over Earth.
Ebert said, “Although
aliens would presumably be more advanced than we laggards on Earth, many of
these aliens seem to have advanced only to the approximate level of the Three
Stooges and are vanquished by a series of bizarre weapons employed by J and K
(you may have seen the previews: "Any idea how to use this?" "None
whatsoever.").”
Ebert goes on to say, “Linda
Fiorentino, still looking for the right role to follow her triumph in "The
Last Seduction," hasn't found it here - but her hard-bitten coroner will
do nicely as an intermediate step.”
The movie makes good
use of a lot of New York landmarks (there’s a chase through the Guggenheim, a
flying saucer lands in She Stadium, and another one has been disguised as an
exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair.) Director Barry Sonnenfeld shows the happy
devotion in the movie’s first hour or so to completely break away from all rules
of boring storytelling and simply let the story have some laughs and
insanities. Ebert noted, “Writer Ed Solomon, who on the basis of this
irreverent screenplay could probably play all three of the critics on
"MST3," deflates one sci-fi pomposity after another.”
When the story finally
does settle in, it slows down the flight a little, but not seriously.
“Men in Black” goes on
in that summer’s tradition, which had “Con Air” and “Batman and Robin” of
big-budget action movies that at least had the humor to know how silly they
were.
If you haven’t seen
this movie, you should, it’s one of my favorite sci-fi comedies ever.
Especially with the classic Will Smith line, “You know what’s the difference
between you and me? I make this look good!” That is one of the funniest lines
ever. As a child, I was obsessed with this movie and would watch it so many times. A few of my cousins still remember how crazy I was over this film.
We’re not done here,
because we are going to look at the sequel, “Men in Black 2,” released in 2002.
Barry Sonnenfeld’s long-awaited
sequel to his 1997 sci-fi comedy blockbuster “Men in Black” for some reason got
bad reviews for being “more of the same.” I agree with John R. McEwen when he
said, “I'm not sure what the critics are expecting—Men In Black II is more of
the same, and that's why it's so entertaining. Reuniting Will Smith and Tommy
Lee Jones, one of the best onscreen duos since Matthau & Lemmon, MIBII does
retrace some steps through New York City's alien crime community, but it
introduces enough new material to be worth the ticket price, and features a
rather amusing role reversal between the two agents, with Agent J (Smith)
showing the former Agent K (Jones) around the halls of the top-secret MIB
facility after K had his memory erased at the end of the first film.” Director
Sonnenfeld, who spent the 1980s as a cinematographer and then suddenly changed
to directing in 1991, has had his share of hits and misses, but soon slowly
gains the silly tone for a worthy continuation of the established MIB story.
Written by Robert
Gordon and Barry Fanaro, based on the comic book story by Lowell Cunningham,
the story is about an evil, wormy alien called Serleena who comes to Earth (in
disguise as the hot model Lara Flynn Boyle) and, with the help of a two-headed
goofball named Scrad (Johnny Knoxville, playing both heads), tries to find the
mysterious Light of Zartha, which will apparently give her power over the
entire universe. As soon as she arrives, MIB chief Zed sees they’ll have to
call back Agent K out of retirement because he’s the only one who knows where
the Light is. K’s former partner J, who has been having trouble finding a new
partner anyway, must drive to a rural town in Massachusetts (where K works as a
postman) and convince him to come back to his previous job. Let’s not forget
restore his entire memory.
McEwen said, “What made
Men In Black work was the exquisite partnership of its two leads, along with a
nice mix of cool effects and a multitude of memorable alien characters, created
with every medium from rubber masks to puppetry to computer graphics. The fact
that Sonnenfeld has chosen not to mess with a good thing doesn't necessarily
mean he's out of ideas, but the formula can't sustain itself indefinitely.”
Some of the new additions of this film are the replacement of the female
character the hot Linda Fiorentino (who apparently won her MIB role from
director Sonnenfeld in a poker game – maybe she lost this time) with the
fresh-looking Rosario Dawson, and some surprising cameos from Chef Martha
Stewart, the late Michael Jackson and Sonnenfeld himself. Also is Patrick
Warburton in a short but hilarious role as J’s previous partner, T. Returning
from the first film are Tony Shalhoub as the rough pawn shop owner who looks to
have an unlimited amount of regenerating heads, and Frank the Dog (voiced by Tim
Blaney), whose role has been really grown for the sequel.
McEwen said, “Smith and
Jones perform together as smoothly as if they never left the studio, and the
script sparkles with very much the same fluorescence.” Boyle is not a good
villain compared to D’Onofrio. McEwen noted, “she basically plays the same
character she plays on The Practice, except she's traded in the severe ponytail
for a full mane of wavy black hair—and she has thousands of worms coming out of
her. Oh, wait, she does have that on The Practice.” While the film’s ending
doesn’t really hint there will be another sequel, it definitely doesn’t
consider that, either. McEwen noted, “I imagine the answer to that will be
determined by that most venerated of Hollywood formulas, the cha-ching factor.”
I know that people didn’t
like this sequel, but I don’t think it’s as bad as everyone said it is. My
siblings saw this in theaters with a couple of our cousins, and my siblings
agreed that we weren’t annoyed by it and didn’t think it was bad. I personally
think this was a good sequel, and definitely one of my favorite sequels. It
might even be better than the first one, in my opinion. Definitely check this
one out and give it a chance.
Much to everyone’s
surprise, they came out with “Men in Black 3,” released in 2012. This comes 15
years after the entertaining original and 10 years after the wrongfully hated
sequel, and the surprise is that it’s probably the best of them. Seeing how
much time has passed, the entire idea may be new to some people watching this, but
it still does work: There is a secret agency tasked to keeping track of every
alien on Earth, and there are as many of them as makeup artist Rick Baker can
think of. Ebert said, “I am not sure how undercover an MiB agent can be when he
dresses exactly like the Blues Brothers, but never mind, they get the job done.”
The story until now:
Veteran Agent K and his younger partner Agent J are under the command of Agent
O, played by Emma Thompson, when there’s an emergency. The horrendously ugly
alien Boris the Animal, played by Jemaine Clement, has escaped from a maximum
security prison on the moon. He is the last surviving member of his people,
still angry because Agent K shot off one of his arms. His plan: Travel back in
time and kill Agent K before that can happen.
An arm like his, you
don’t want shot off. Ebert noted, “Its palm apparently serves as a condo for a
nasty little insectoid creature that will leap and take chunks out of you. Indeed,
Boris is one of those aliens whose entire body seems to contain openings from
which unappetizing things can forage on its victims.”
Time travel can become
really difficult. To make it easy: Agent J tries to travel back in time to stop
Boris the Animal from killing K. This happens as Young K alive in the same time
period as J, who is the same age he started as, so the old man and the rookie
are now equals.
How this works is the
movie’s most impressive success. Young Agent K is played, not by Tommy Lee Jones
in prosthetic makeup, but by Josh Brolin. The casting is done perfectly. He
looks like a young Tommy Lee Jones, and Brolin imitates Jones so perfectly that
director Barry Sonnenfeld, hearing him, supposedly cried from relief. Ebert
admitted, “While watching the movie, I was convinced Jones dubbed his own
voice.” Remember that Brolin also sounded just like former President George W.
Bush in “W.”
Ebert said, “Anyway,
Agent J travels back to save Agent K, and not content to populate the film with
countless gob-smacking aliens from Rick Baker's fertile imagination, Sonnenfeld
and his writer, Etan Cohen, also show a Hitchcockian flair for using ironic
locations. For reasons I don't understand, in order to return to the
"present," it's necessary to fall from a very great height and push a
button on a gizmo at the last second. This involves Agent J crawling out on one
of those medieval-looking eagles atop the Chrysler building, something you can
imagine Hitch assigning Cary Grant to do.”
A skillful final scene
takes place at Cape Kennedy on the day of the first moon landing attempt.
Another gadget must be put on the moon to save the Earth, and this has a
last-minute try to jump on the Apollo 11 pilot seat, insert the gadget and
escape using one of the eject seats given for the astronauts in case of an emergency.
Since the first moon launch was televised with many TV cameras and examined by
endless binoculars, it looks unlikely this would have gone unnoticed. Ebert
said, “Maybe there's a loophole — like if the attempt succeeds, it changes the
future and turns out to be unnecessary.”
Who cares? The movie
gets a comic relief from a sidekick character named Griffin, played by Michael
Stuhlbarg, who wears a knitted Elmer Fudd hat and has the ability to see all
the different variations resulting from any event during time travel. “Uh, oh,”
he’s always saying, “this is the one where…”
Ebert ended his review
by saying, “Let me say that although I liked the first “MiB” movie, I wasn't
particularly looking forward to this belated sequel. But I had fun. It has an
ingenious plot, bizarre monsters, audacious cliff-hanging, and you know what? A
closing scene that adds a new and sort of touching dimension to the characters
of J and K.”
In the end, I
personally think that each installment got better and better. The first one was
all about J, the second was about K, and this one has a “Back to the Future” feel to it which made J and K’s partnership grow closer as friends. This is another
one of those great “Buddy Cop” movies that you should check out. Like the last
two, this is another one of my favorites. If you saw the previous two, definitely
see this one. My siblings saw the first one in theaters since I wasn’t old
enough to go watch it, but we own it on VHS, so I took two of my younger cousins to see
the third one. My siblings saw this as a rental from the library, and they liked it.
This is one of those trilogies that I recommend everyone to watch, because like
I already stated, this is one of my favorites.
Alright everyone,
thanks for joining in on this long review, stay tuned in two days when I review
my “Independence Day Movie.”
