Men in Black (1997)

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Rating: PG-13
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld
Writers: Lowell Cunningham (comic), Ed Solomon (screenplay),
Stars: Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Linda Fiorentino
Release Date: July 2, 1997 (United States)
Run time: 1 hours, 39 minutes

THE PLOT:

(via wiki)

In 1961, the Men in Black (MiB) organization is founded after secretly making first contact with extraterrestrials. Ever since, they established Earth as a politically neutral zone for alien refugees who live in secret among humanity, monitor and police their actions, and utilize memory-erasing neuralyzer devices to maintain secrecy.

In 1997, MiB Agents K and D interrupt a border patrol sting at the Mexico–United States border to apprehend Mikey, a disguised extraterrestrial. When he tries to attack one of the patrol officers, K shoots him and neuralyzes the officers. Feeling that he is too old to continue working and wishing to retire, D asks K to neuralyze him, who reluctantly complies.

Sometime later, NYPD plain clothes officer James Darrell Edwards III catches an unnaturally agile criminal, who later commits suicide. While being reprimanded by his superiors, James is visited by K, who scouts him as a potential MiB recruit. Once he passes the MiB’s tests, James becomes Agent J while the MiB erases him from government records.

Meanwhile, an alien “Bug” crash-lands in upstate New York, kills a farmer named Edgar, and wears his skin as a disguise. Tipped off by tabloid reporting, the agents interview the farmer’s wife while the Bug fatally wounds two disguised aliens, who are presumed dead and sent to a city morgue overseen by coroner Laurel Weaver. While investigating the Bug’s activities, K and J reach the morgue, where one of the aliens tells J and Laurel that “the galaxy is on Orion’s belt” before dying. After neuralyzing Laurel, K identifies the alien as Rosenberg, an Arquillian prince, before taking J to question an informant named Frank. Frank reveals that Rosenberg was on Earth protecting a miniature galaxy, a precious source of subatomic energy, and that the Bug wants to use it to destroy the Arquillians. Concurrently, the MiB learns an Arquillian warship has entered Earth’s orbit, demanding the galaxy.

J and the Bug separately deduce the galaxy is attached to the collar of Rosenberg’s cat, Orion, which fell into Laurel’s care. The Bug reaches Laurel first, swallows the galaxy, and kidnaps her. As the Arquillians threaten to destroy Earth to prevent the Bug from escaping with the galaxy, the MiB lock down all transport routes while J realizes the Bug is heading for the New York State Pavilion, which the MiB used to hide two flying saucers in 1964. As Laurel escapes the Bug’s custody, he attempts to leave Earth, but K and J shoot him down. Incensed, the Bug reveals its true form and swallows the agents’ weapons. After K provokes it into eating him too, J antagonizes it long enough for K to find his gun and blow the Bug in half from the inside, recovering the galaxy. The Bug tries to attack the agents, but Laurel finds J’s gun and kills it.

After returning the galaxy to the Arquillians, K confesses he was training J to succeed him so he can retire. The pair bid each other farewell before J neuralyzes K. Sometime later, K reunites with his wife while J is joined by Laurel, now Agent L.

My Review

One of the reasons that comedies often fail to hold up, over the long haul, is that humor is usually related to the present-day Zeitgeist. After enough time passes, the Zeitgeist moves on, so the humor of an old comedy ends up aimed at an expired target. One of the reasons that action movies often fail to hold up, over the long haul, is that special effects are constantly improving – thus given a long enough span of time they look dated. Unfortunately, though not surprising three decades later, both of those common aging film problems were true for Men in Black.

A lot of the funny moments of this movie were products of the 1990s – whether that be learning as the film ends that NBA star Dennis Rodman is an alien, or finding out earlier that Elvis did not die and was an alien who just went home, or seeing on a big screen of monitors that Newt Gingrich, Dionne Warwick, Sylvester Stallone, and other celebrities are extra-terrestrials in human disguises. However, the biggest thing for me that failed to hold up to the passage of time was Will Smith. He made a fortune, over the course of many years, playing swaggering fish-out-of-water characters (can fish swagger?) who made you laugh while being tough, but as I have seen him do that too many times to count, the role has gone stale for me.

The action from the movie isn’t bad, especially given its age – but it definitely does look like it’s almost 30 years old. The bug alien at the end was done using practical effects, and while it was done really well, the CGI of today could probably have rendered it better. None of the old action sequences took me out of the film, but they were noticeable.

My biggest critique of the movie is that I don’t think it really knew who it wanted its audience to be. A lot of the hokey alien humor seemed to be playing at an older geek culture audience that probably grew up watching classic science fiction from the 1960s and 1970s. The villain also seemed aimed at that group – with a comedic human form before ultimately being an oversized bug. Will Smith, conversely, was definitely aimed at bringing in a younger audience. I don’t think the two elements always blended well.

Ultimately PG-13 was the correct rating, but the movie would have been better served aiming at either being PG, or jettisoning some of its silliness to be more for the adults. By threading the needle, it seems the filmmakers were hoping to have parents take their teenagers to go see it. When I was a teenager, I didn’t go see movies with my parents anymore. Maybe theaters ended up getting both groups, but not together. The more edgy stuff from the film limited the size of the kid audience that the film could attract and I doubt it played really well with the older crowd, either. So what was the point? The failure to make the film just a little cleaner seemed like a missed opportunity to tell a more tonally consistent story and to a larger potential audience.

Overall, this was a very middle of the road movie. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great. As a result, I can’t really say that I recommend it. If you really loved it a long time ago, nostalgia might be enough to get you over the comedy hump that I couldn’t climb. It wasn’t enough for me.

Have you seen Men in Black? If so, what did you think?