Marvel Movie Madness! Part 26: Men in Black

Daniel Raimondi

MIB ruled but its not marvel

Jul 6 - 08:18 PM

Sean Y.

About the movie, I'm simply going to say I loved it.

Here's my take on the "it is/isn't a Marvel movie" debate:

Note that this is Marvel MOVIE madness. Now, I know (at least now I do) that the MiB comic was not published by Marvel. However, that is the COMIC, not the movie. At the time the movie was made, Marvel owned the rights to MiB due to their acquisition of Malibu comics in 1994. Thus, at the time the movie was made, MiB was technically a Marvel property, making the movie a Marvel movie.

I recognize contrary arguments, but this is just my take.

Jul 6 - 08:53 PM

Luke Simpson

Know what I'm excited about? Will Smith working with M. Night but mostly M. Night working with a CO-WRITER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jul 6 - 09:21 PM

Ryan Bowlby

MIB is just a good fun movie.

Jul 6 - 11:48 PM

King Simba

Didn't even know MIB was based on a comic book, much less a Marvel comic, but anyway, it's great fun and Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones have great chemistry. One of my favourite science fiction comedies, right up there with Back to the Future and Ghostbusters.

On a side note, there seems to be a lot of similarities between Ghostbusters and MIB. Both science fiction comedies that take an aspect that was previously used for the most part only for action or horror (Ghostbusters - ghosts, MIB - aliens) and turned them into comedy with a big name cast, both spawened an animated series and a sequel released five years later that was basically just a carbon copy of the original (and both MIB2 and GB2 involved regrouping the team at the begining of the film after they got seperated), while attempts at a third stalled for a long period of time (though MIB3 is finally coming out next year), not to mention they both had titular songs that were big hits.

Jul 7 - 04:34 AM

Justin D.

This was a great bit of summer entertainment, and the casting was perfect (all save Linda Fiorentino...she wasn't all that interesting). Vincent D'Onfrio was amazing. He does crazy so well. Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith surprised me w/ the chemistry they had on screen together. Normally Smith tends to hog the scenery, chewing the crap out of everything in sight, but somehow Jones was able to tame the beast and balance everything out. Rick Baker really outdid himself w/ the FX (w/ some help from Barry Sonnenfield and Steven Spielberg). The world he and ILM created was so immersive that, to this day I still walk around entertaining the idea that some of my fellow New Yorkers are actually aliens in disguise.

I'm trying to find complaints about this movie beyond Will Smith's tendency to overact, and the aforementioned lack of back story for J before he joined the MiB, but honestly I can't come up w/ any. This movie was fun. I guess I could complain that if this movie hadn't been successful we wouldn't have that dreadful sequel.

Jul 7 - 07:41 AM

Gordon Terry

my sentiments exactly:


`Men in Black' Alienating Comedy


ALERT VIEWER MEN IN BLACK: Action comedy. Starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. (PG-13. 98 minutes.)
``Men in Black,'' the second Will-Smith-versus-the- aliens picture, is a high- tech comedy, more along the lines of a tight little action movie than a bona fide blockbuster. It was the smallest of the big summer films, the most slickly made -- and the most old-fashioned.

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, ``Men in Black'' has the gloss and the wit of Sonnenfeld's other comedies (``Get Shorty,'' ``The Addams Family''). Sonnenfeld uses odd angles and wide lenses to view the action with a sardonic eye, as if the onscreen events were a joke between director and audience. But if ``Men in Black'' is a joke, who's the joke on? [an error occurred while processing this directive] The picture moves. Smith, as a New York policeman, is introduced in a long sequence showing him chasing a criminal on foot. This criminal can do everything, even climb up the sides of buildings. When Smith catches up, he notices something strange. This fellow doesn't blink up and down but side to side; he has an extra pair of lids.

Turns out it's just one of many space aliens living in the United States, under the supervision of the government. Tommy Lee Jones plays K, a special agent in charge of regulating alien activity, and he soon recruits Smith as Agent J. They dress in black, wear sunglasses and check up on aliens all day.

Some of these aliens are marvelous special-effects creations. There are slinky, wormy little aliens who smoke cigarettes and drink coffee. There's one beautifully done computer sequence in which a human- looking alien gets its head shot off and immediately grows another.

From the visual angle, the most satisfying effect is the makeup job on Vincent D'Onofrio, who plays a big insect-like alien inhabiting the body of a farmer. D'Onofrio's skin is made up to look as if he's just put it on -- like a bedspread that hasn't been smoothed out.

Other effects are merely grotesque -- an alien explodes, covering bystanders in blue goo. Unlike ``Independence Day,'' which had real exuberance about it, ``Men in Black'' is never better than its gimmick. At times, it even leaves a bad aftertaste. After all, the Men in Black aren't merry entrepreneurs, like the Ghostbusters. They're cold-blooded bureaucrats whose job is to control and suppress information. The film dishes out the requisite handful of big splashy moments, but in mainly succeeds at manipulation.

Jul 7 - 09:32 AM

Gordon Terry

Again, (Men In Black is not All THAT great.)

by Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman | Jul 11, 1997

Blockbusters used to take us by surprise. Not anymore. The popularity of to-day's summer-movie blitzkriegs is all but preordained by marketing onslaughts, media coverage, and advance word of mouth that effectively turns the audience into an extension of the advertainment-hype complex. When the picture itself arrives, it's with all the spontaneity of a national holiday. Yet it isn't just publicity overkill that makes movies like Independence Day, The Lost World, or this year's July 4 supernova, Men in Black, into ready-made insta-Events. The films themselves are as reassuringly digestible ? and forgettable ? as fast food.

Men in Black is a comedy of facetiousness in which facetiousness consumes everything in its path ? including the movie. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (Get Shorty), who never met a scene he couldn't turn into a goof, the film features the appealing team of Tommy Lee Jones (stoic straight guy) and Will Smith (stoic punchline machine) as top secret federal agents whose job is to monitor the 1,500 extraterrestrials who wander in disguise among us, and to erase any human memory of those creatures, a task they accomplish with a flashing light stick known as a ''neuralizer.'' The idea that aliens are alive and well and living in Cleveland obviously has a lot going for it. The joke of Men in Black is that aliens have arrived, and they're not monsters...they're pests. In its throwaway absurdity, the picture mirrors the ironic nonchalance of '90s America, a place that feels ? or at least wants to feel ? that it has neutered most of its enemies.

In the desert night, a rubbery beastie with tubular limbs stands holding its disguise (a pole with a head on it), and Jones, the image of unflappable cool, stares at this startling vision and says, ''Put up your arms, and all your flippers!'' If that's your idea of wit, you'll love Men in Black. Some of the extraterrestrials are goofy, and some are nasty, like the big bug that eats redneck Vincent D'Onofrio, turning him into a crazed ? and rotty-skinned ? zombie. But most of the aliens are outsize comic-book jokes, like the one that grabs Smith in its giant tentacle or the croaky gremlins who sit around a secret federal lab smoking and drinking coffee.

A spoofy sci-fi grab bag, Men in Black combines the anthropomorphic kiddie ghoulishness of the Star Wars bar scene with the blase showbiz hipsterism of Ghostbusters. This is a movie in which the heroes defeat their foes using a variety of complicated silvery guns, but mostly by employing their nothing-fazes-me cheekiness to render the situations in which they find themselves harmless. It's no surprise that Smith gets most of the good lines, or that he zings them with his inimitably suave popcorn-homeboy timing. Smith's sexiness makes him likable rather than dangerous ? it says, ''I look so good, I don't even have to be this funny!'' Most of his rejoinders, though, don't have much to do with the movie's premise (he's at his best dismissing a hick's sorry decor with a definitive ''Damn!''), and after a while the nonstop blitheness begins to make everything seem strangely inconsequential.

The lightweight high jinks of Men in Black are linked to the signature moment of Independence Day, in which Smith decked an alien as if he were hitting a plastic punching doll. (You'd think he would have halted for at least a moment in fear or surprise.) Men in Black celebrates the triumph of attitude over everything else ? plausibility, passion, any sense that what we're watching actually matters. The aliens, for all their slimy visual zest, aren't particularly scary or funny (they aren't allowed to become characters), and so the joke of watching Smith and Jones crack wise in their faces quickly wears thin. Then again, what can you say about a movie in which a product placement ? for Ray-Bans ? defines its heroes as well as anything in the script? For all its oddball felicities, Men in Black is as hollow as Styrofoam. Every time the film makes you chuckle, you may also feel it's zapped you with a neuralizer. C+

Jul 7 - 09:35 AM

Gordon Terry

here:

mindless and stylish, 23 September 2001
5/10
Author: m_madhu from chennai, india

slick and boring. glitz and mud. a smart action movie is too much to ask for i guess. the movie falls somewhere betewen being a smart funny movie and a smart action flick and falls in the stupid neither category.

will smith looks stylish enough to carry it all off. there are a lot of funny bits, assuming you havent dozed off, u might catch them.

good luck.

---

Jul 7 - 09:41 AM

Gordon Terry

and here:

Fun but totally unmemorable, 11 January 2002
Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK

When NYPD cop Edwards pursues a subject that he believes was some form of alien he finds a mysterious agent believes him and offers him an interview. When Agent K offers him a position as a man in black he discovers an underworld of aliens that is regulated and hidden. When a bug comes to earth in search of the universe agents K and J find themselves in a race against time to stop the bug and prevent the destruction of the earth.

This film was well hyped when it first came out and got plenty of good publicity through Smith's song of the same name. However it always felt like a film that was gearing itself up for a sequel rather than a film in itself. The story is in two strands - the first is J's fish out of water act and the second is the search for the universe. These two interlink as the main body is the attempt to stop the bug, but the funniest moments involve J being overwhelmed by the tings around him - in this setting he is the most accessible character to the audience as we are experiencing the same as him. The plot is a little daft but it's all delivered with tongue in cheek and has enough laughs to keep us amused.

Smith delivers yet another popcorn blockbuster and does his usual cocky performance that we've seen so many times - the only thing that stops him getting irritating is that he is clearly out of his depth in K's world. Tommy Lee Jones is very good and in my mind, a lot cooler than Smith, he does get some good deadpan lines but mainly is Smith's straight man. It's hard to imagine anyone else doing the role as he does it so well and I hope they manage to twist the sequel to bring his character back in - I can't image Smith can carry MIB2. Fiorentino, D'Onofrio, Shalhoub and Rip Torn all add class in support but this is mainly Smith and Jones's show.

The special effects are good and the action is cool in a comic book style. However the length of the film and the focus on K and J's interaction rather than a straight up plot does make it feel like it was made with an eye on a franchise rather than the film as a complete package itself.

Overall a funny stylish comedy that will amuse throughout.

Jul 7 - 09:42 AM

Gordon Terry

multiple people agree with me . . . MEN IN BLACK isn't all that good.

If Men in Black is THAT GOOD, why do some people dislike it?

Jul 7 - 09:44 AM

Stephen Davis

This movie is awesome. Tommy Lee jones and Will Smith are perfect in this movie. However the sequel to this movie wasn't very good. But lets see how the next sequel, Men in Black 3, will be. I'm looking forward to it.

Jul 7 - 03:07 PM