mib2

MEN IN BLACK II
If it's the same movie, does it still count as a sequel?

Starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Lara Flynn Boyle, Rosario Dawson. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld.

Men in Black, the original flick, was a lot of fun. Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith had great chemistry, the music and visuals were terrific, and director Barry Sonnenfeld created a highly entertaining vision of an Earth secretly populated by, for the most part, friendly alien visitors. What made it great for me was it's fun, fresh sensibility. By the end, you felt you'd seen something that, while far from a masterpiece, was new, didn't take itself too seriously, and was all set up to take you in a new direction should the inevitable sequel occur.

Guess what? That feeling turned out to be wrong. Not about the sequel being inevitable, no, this is Hollywood we're talking about. What was wrong was any hope of a new direction, or any sense of the first film's originality seeping into the second. Linda Fiorentino, the sensuous morgue-worker who became Will Smith's new partner by the end of the first film, was nowhere in sight this time around, written off in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line of dialogue. Instead, we see Smith having become a fairly disaffected workaholic who ends up having to retrieve Agent K (good old Tommy Lee) from his neuro-retirement in part of a messy plotline involving the fate of the planet. Oddly enough, the woman in Jones' life has ALSO been dismissed and written away without being seen, a disturbing trend in the flick, but one whose purpose quickly becomes obvious: do ANYTHING to preserve the status quo of the first film. Sonnenfeld and company know what made the bucks the first time around, and aren't going to take any chances on number two. This movie plays out less like a stand on it's own piece of work, rather than the cast of Men in Black performing their homage to Men in Black, perverse as that sounds. Nothing new to see here, even the supporting characters and background aliens are all recycled from the first movie, betraying an insultingly lazy streak on the moviemakers part this time out.

The only really new things in this movie are two female characters, perhaps to replace the ones they decided not to bother bringing back. They really shouldn't have bothered. Lara Flynn Boyle tries to vamp it up as the baddie of the piece, and this is hard to say being as I'm a hard-core TWIN PEAKS fan, but sweet Jesus does she ever stink up the joint. Even seeing her in her underwear barely dulls the pain of her performance. And Rosario Dawson, though terribly engaging, is so underdeveloped in her role you wonder why they even bothered giving her character a name.

Summing up, I was bored through every moment of this movie. This is, in every sense but the literal one, a poor carbon copy of the original MIB, washed out of any scent of innovation or risk. Though basically inoffensive in and of itself, there's nothing new here. If you've seen the first movie, and liked it, you may actually like this one, as it spends so much time trying to imitate the high points of the original. But if you look closer you'll realize, that's all it is...an imitation. And not a great one at that.

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