Men in Black II (2002)
*/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Rip Torn, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
by Walter Chaw Coming in at just shy of eighty-five minutes, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black II is that breed of value-free summer entertainment–call it the “lacklustre blockbuster”–that gives mainstream movies a bad name. It’s all first act and no second or third, meaning everything that happens in the film would function as the set-up in a real film (see also: all of ‘Episodes‘ 1 and 2), and that its primary purpose is to act the whorish shill for product placement–never does the silver screen so resemble a bulletin board as when this variety of film drags itself into the googolplex. Special effects are asked to behave like character, motivation, and narrative while the actors paid exorbitant amounts to caper by themselves before a blue screen do their best not to cackle like Snidely Whiplash making off with burlap bags that have dollar signs painted on them. The audience is the damsel in distress in this flickering melodrama, tied to the railroad tracks as a great lumbering behemoth barrels down, the engineer asleep at the rudder.