Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson in 'Men In Black: International'
It is frustrating how Men in Black: International sacrifices what works (or should work) about its premise for the sake of an overwritten plot. The mystery at the heart of this fourth installment is somewhat intriguing, mostly because it teases darker implications than it eventually provides. But the busy international adventure ends up negating what we should have come to see, namely Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson being (non-romantically) charming together while encountering various comedic aliens.
The $110 million-budgeted Sony/Hemisphere/Tencent co-production starts well enough with two prologues. The first, set in 2016, sees Agent H (Chris Hemsworth) and Agent T (Liam Neeson) doing battle with an alien menace on the Eiffel Tower. This sequence features the franchise's trademark "incredible sci-fi elements being treated as normal to the point of boring" humor and a promisingly smaller scale.
The next, set "20 years ago" (so 1999?), features a young girl who witnesses her parents getting neuralyzed and (as we'll learn) spent the next two decades trying to find the secret organization. The first reel, which features Tessa Thompson convincing Emma Thompson to become the Men In Black's first non-recruited member, is solid. Thompson and Thompson (no relation and not a shampoo) have strong chemistry and Tessa's "Agent M" offers a realistic mix of idealism and practicality.
But the film's problems begin when she's sent to London and unofficially teamed with Agent H. Through little fault of his own, the screenplay (penned by Art Marcum and Matt Holloway) forces Hemsworth to portray Agent H as an obnoxious schmuck for most of the film's 115-minute running time. There are reasons for this, as various agents and aliens remark that he hasn't been the same since that incident in Paris, but the solution isn't interesting enough to justify forcing Hemsworth to play a jerk for at least the first 2/3 of the film.
As a result, you'll find yourself wishing that Tessa went back to New York to partner up with Emma instead. Oddly enough, to the extent the movie still works, it does so as a genuine mystery. Whether you'll "figure it out" well before it shows its cards, the film tries to be more of a film noir than its predecessors, with all three main male (human) characters (Hemsworth, Neeson and Rafe Spall) drawing suspicion as possible "surprise" villains.
Spall, by the by, plays an MIB bureaucrat who is fed up with Hemsworth's cowboy tactics, and the movie seems to agree with him. This stuff works because, franchise dreams notwithstanding, it's teased that Hemsworth might not be on the up-and-up and that this movie may turn into a riff on Training Day. There's a brief pay-off scene that will remind you of the same scene in Training Day that was homaged in Zootopia, and a third-act encounter with an alien crime lord (Rebecca Ferguson) finally jolts the movie to life in a way the past hour has not.
To its credit, the F. Gary Gray-directed film doesn't feel like a remake/redo of the previous Barry Sonnenfeld pictures. The downside of this approach is that the whole "aliens live among us" hook becomes glorified window dressing. That the movie happens to involve extra-terrestrial immigration agents is almost irrelevant to the somewhat old-fashioned spy thriller narrative.
Aside from Kumail Nanjiani's admittedly witty Pawny, who ends up joining the mission for reasons I won't reveal, the film's alien elements are entirely beside the point. That means, by default (or by design), that the movie isn't really about anything. Whether a failure of imagination or courage, this Men in Black sequel doesn't have anything to say about immigration even in a story about comparatively benevolent immigration agents.
Tessa Thompson is terrific, per usual, but her character is mostly reactionary, and the overall plot prevents her from breaking out. There are individual moments of visual imagination and verbal wit, and the picture (shot in New York City, Morocco, Italy and London) looks polished throughout. It is visually pleasing, competently staged and adequately performed, but it's not really about anything beyond its existence as a glorified pilot for a franchise revamp.
The fatal flaw is that it prioritizes plot over character chemistry in a way that turns Chris Hemsworth into a glorified frat-boy for much of the running time. The Men in Black series has always been defined by its comparatively smaller-scale and off-the-cuff approach to blockbuster tropes. Men in Black: International may not up the scale by that much, but it seems determined to put the tropes front-and-center rather than merely treating them as background gags.
