\u201cYou might want to think about changing the name to X-Women,\u201d Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) said in <\/span>last week\u2019s depressingly abysmal <\/span>Dark Phoenix<\/span><\/i><\/a>, and this week, we get <\/span>Men in Black: International<\/i><\/b>\u2019s Molly, aka Agent M (Tessa Thompson), asking why the alien-hunting government organization won\u2019t add \u201cWomen\u201d to its title. (Easier to write lines like these, I guess, than actually hire women to write or direct your blockbuster?) But that\u2019s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this international mess of a reboot that quite frankly I don\u2019t remember <\/span>anyone<\/span><\/i> asking for\u2026 <\/span><\/p>\n The original <\/span>Men in Black<\/span><\/i>, released in 1997, made sense: It was the height of <\/span>The X-Files<\/span><\/i> mania \u2014 you know, before the show went completely off the rails with all that colony stuff \u2014 and Will Smith (formerly known for <\/span>The Fresh Prince<\/span><\/i>) was still riding high on the popularity of his alien-hunting action-hero character in <\/span>Independence Day<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>Men in Black<\/span><\/i> was based on a comic book series, sure, and there were certainly all the crazy-looking aliens and explosions you\u2019d expect that to entail, but at the end of the day, it was a buddy comedy, and it worked thanks to the way its script played Smith\u2019s wisecracking loose cannon against co-star Tommy Lee Jones\u2019 deadpan professional.<\/span><\/p>\n That brings us to one of the biggest problems with this reboot: While leads Tessa Thompson (as the uptight American rookie) and Chris Hemsworth (as the rule-breaking veteran based in London) are very likable and very funny together, the convoluted script never lets their characters breathe and find their rhythm. They\u2019re kept<\/span> very<\/span><\/i> busy by director F. Gary Gray and screenwriters Matt Holloway and Art Marcum, who have them constantly running from aliens, blowing things up, and engaging in high-speed, heavily CGI’d chase sequences as they attempt to ferret out a mole within the Men in Black organization. (By the way, if you\u2019ve seen more than one episode of <\/span>Law and Order: SVU<\/span><\/i>, you\u2019ll probably be able to figure out who the mole is pretty quickly.)<\/span><\/p>\n That whole MIB mole subplot wasn\u2019t enough for Holloway and Marcum, however. They also cram in an entire subplot that centers around a pair of shape-shifting aliens (played by twins Larry and Laurent Bourgeois) on the hunt for a deadly weapon, as well as Hemsworth\u2019s character\u2019s three-armed arms-dealing ex (say that three times fast) who lives on a heavily fortified Italian island. For whatever reason, there\u2019s also a tiny little alien named Pawny (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) whose only real purpose in the story is to provide a little comic relief \u2014 and probably sell a whole lot of merch down the line, if this whole thing goes the way the producers and the studio planned. <\/span>He is Groot.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n You know how those Chris Carter\u2013penned mytharc episodes of <\/span>The X-Files<\/span><\/i> could be such a drag, the way they prioritized world-building and exposition-filled dialogue over the characters at the core of the stories? And how those Vince Gilligan (or Morgan and Wong) monster-of-the-week episodes \u2014 especially the ones that just let Mulder and Scully hang around some small town in the middle of nowhere meeting the local weirdos and cracking wise as they looked for the aliens or monsters or shape-shifters \u2014 are the ones that really stick in fans\u2019 minds? That\u2019s the thing the original <\/span>Men in Black<\/span><\/i>\u2019s screenwriter, Ed Solomon, understood, and something studios today have forgotten in their quest to make every summer blockbuster bigger and flashier than the last. Well, folks \u2014 we\u2019re now batting two for two when it comes to summer comic book movies and their (wildly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":568,"featured_media":11990,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/crookedc.png\")
<\/span><\/p>\nGrade: C-<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 54 min.; rated PG-13 for sci-fi action, some language and suggestive material<\/em><\/h5>\n
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