BEFORE: Obviously there's a lot going on in the world, or to be more specific, there's a lot of shutting things down going on in the world, from bars to restaurants to movie theaters. Nothing feels quite right, I went into Manhattan today just for a couple hours to run payroll at my office and check the e-mails, because as of Monday, we're shut down for nobody-knows-how-long. As long as it takes for, what, the rate of Covid infection to decrease? For nobody to be sick any more? Until the economy rebounds? Nobody's really sure - are we looking at two weeks until recovery, or will there be a months-long recession, or a year-long depression? It's uncertain.
With everyone either quarantined or self-sheltered for a couple weeks, the street people have basically taken over the city. Three blocks of Sixth Avenue near 23rd St. looked like a shantytown, and I can't tell you how many people were begging for money while I was walking 7 blocks to the subway to come home. I'm not in any hurry to go back into Manhattan,
I don't even know if it's appropriate to be watching movies, but I'm going to keep broadcasting from the Hot Zone until somebody tells me to stop. It feels sort of like it did after 9/11 in 2001, where people didn't know if it was appropriate to watch sports, go out to eat or even laugh at comedy. Now you can't even DO two of those things, so all we're left with is entertainment, and there's not even a lot to laugh about right now. So what can we do?
Rebecca Ferguson carries over from "The Kid Who Would Be King".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Men in Black 3" (Movie #1,471)
THE PLOT: The Men in Black have always protected the Earth from the scum of the universe. In this newest adventure, they tackle their biggest threat to date: a mole in the organization.
AFTER: This movie made some money last year, $253 million last year, with a budget of $110 million. Too bad creatively the film is nearly bankrupt. I think I'd probably rather watch a franchise die than to have such a bad installment get released - that's why sometimes it takes 10 or 20 years to release a sequel, because the forces with creative control may turn down bad script after bad script. It's a case where the wait is sometimes worth it, if the result is good. This just seems like they plowed ahead with the first moderately interesting ideas, despite the fact that none of the original cast was willing and/or able to participate (except Emma Thompson, the only real carry-over star from "Men in Black 3")
The director of the first three MIB films, Barry Sonnenfeld, didn't come back either, so that could be why this installment doesn't really feel very connected to the previous three. "MIB 3" also relied heavily on time travel, which I usually love, and also had Josh Brolin playing a young version of Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K, which was a very smart ideas. Not very many smart ideas in tonight's film, though, and it showed. I miss that interplay between the rookie agent and the grizzled veteran agent, and "MIB 3" even turned that around on itself. This installment has one probationary agent teaming up with a notoriously lazy screw-up agent, and that just didn't work. They can't be BOTH bad at what they do, or nothing's going to get accomplished.
And that's exactly what resulted - a whole lot of nothing. Oh, they go to different cities, meet a couple of not-very-interesting aliens, there's some tech that does stuff, but what exactly does it all add up to? The pieces just don't fit together well at all, not enough to form a coherent storyline from the start to the finish - and that seems like a really, really basic goal. You can't dazzle me with weird characters and then give them nothing to DO. Or show me a bunch of flashy tech and then be very vague about its purpose. What were they even GOING FOR with this installment?
Seriously, it feels like some writers just wanted to take pieces of the old jokes from the other MIB films, and re-use them again - like the "red button" that makes the car go really fast. Ugh, can't somebody write some new bits for the new film? They can't ALL be running gags and shout-outs to the previous films, right? The IMDB trivia section tells me that this was initially going to be a crossover with the "21 Jump Street" franchise, which is another terrible idea - honestly, that's the only way I think this installment could have been worse.
The alien hover-bike, the alien that looks like a beard, the alien lady with three (or is it four?) arms - these things just go absolutely NOWHERE. OK, finally there's an alien race, the Hive, that's threatening to invade (or is it destroy?) the Earth. I thought, "Ah, at last we're getting somewhere." Nope, they're defeated pretty rapidly once the two lead agents figure out what's going on. Never has saving the world from aliens been this boring.
I don't know, is it me? Did I miss something here? Was I too distracted by everything else going on in the world to be able to relax and get into this story? Or have I just seen aliens attacking the planet a few too many times? Is it hard to get behind a simple alien-invasion plot when there's a very complicated pandemic going on outside? I've got more questions than answers, I'm afraid. But knowing that one reviewer called this film "Meh in Black", maybe it's not me, maybe it is the movie. Perhaps I'm not the only one who wishes to be neuralyzed so I can forget about this movie - that's OK, I think it will happen naturally fairly soon.
Also starring Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Tessa Thompson (last seen in "Creed II"), Liam Neeson (last heard in "The Nut Job"), Rafe Spall (last seen in "Stan & Ollie"), Laurent Bourgeois, Larry Bourgeois, Emma Thompson (last heard in "Missing Link"), Kayvan Novak (last heard in "Early Man"), Marcy Harriell (last seen in "Death Proof"), Inny Clemons, Mandeiya Flory and the voices of Kumail Nanjani (last seen in "Central Intelligence"), Thom Fountain (last heard in "Men in Black 3"), Drew Massey (last heard in "The Happytime Murders"), Tim Blaney (ditto), Spencer Wilding (last seen in "Pan"), with archive footage of J.J. Abrams (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Donald Glover (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Ariana Grande, Elon Musk.
RATING: 3 out of 10 pairs of sunglasses
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