I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth had such delicious comic chemistry in Thor: Ragnarok that I was super psyched to hear that they would be costarring in a sequel to/reboot of the Men in Black franchise. The 1997 original is surely one of the great studio comedies, and without question of the best science-fiction comedies ever, in perhaps the toughest genre crossover to pull off. An MIB flick with these two at its center? Gotta be a can’t-miss, right?
Wrong. It’s shocking all the ways in which Men in Black: International squanders absolutely everything it had going for it. That begins with how it mysteriously performs a nearly complete charmectomy on its usually hugely charismatic stars, moves on to leaving them to flounder about with a bizarrely inept script, and actually seems as if it might be trolling us with its pseudo feminism.
I mean, look: Thompson’s (Avengers: Endgame, Creed II) newbie Agent M, on probation during her first case, is literally brilliant, a genius hacker and, perhaps even more importantly for MIB work, someone who sees big-picture stuff, is able to put together enormous mysteries from hidden-in-plain-sight clues; also, she’s not afraid to confront the scary secrets of the universe. She’s almost a clichéd “perfect girl,” the sort of absurdly flawless woman whom male screenwriters — in this case, Matt Holloway and Art Marcum (as a team: Iron Man) — mistakenly believe is feminist. (Women are people. Women are human: messy and messed up, confused and damaged. You know, like men are. This is the essence of feminism. Anyone who thinks that feminism means “women are perfect” is not only not a feminist, but is a deluded idiot.) M is saved from this only because she does have a bit of a personal journey of growth and learning of her own — usually the “perfect girl” is present merely to support a man on his journey — and because Thompson is so amazing that even this dumb crap cannot keep her down. Even with the movie working against her, she is still able to bring some human personality and human fallibilities to M.
But contrast her with Hemsworth’s (Bad Times at the El Royale, 12 Strong) Agent H, with whom M is partnered for no real reason beyond plot convenience. It doesn’t take long for M to peg him, accurately, as “vaguely inept, arrogant, reckless”; another character, more succinctly, tags him as a “jackass.” He is someone who seems to constantly fail upward; he is definitely someone about whom we see little evidence of why he is so valued in the MIB organization beyond the usual fact of white men constantly failing upward, with the support of other white men. There is real room in this movie for this to have been treated satirically… except no one involved appears to have even realized what they had. This movie is a terrific example of how, just as you cannot deploy “feminism” without knowing what you’re doing, you also cannot deploy “diversity” without knowing what you’re doing. If M were another white man, rather than a black woman, well, then, the dynamic between these two characters wouldn’t be laden with this unspoken underlying thematic stuff.
Please, please, Hollywood: Hire women screenwriters and women directors if you genuinely want to be feminist. (MIBI has a director of color in F. Gary Gray [The Fate of the Furious, Straight Outta Compton]. He seems to have missed what he had here, too.) Probably you don’t want that, though, or else you wouldn’t just toss in some rando pandering. But we are on to you. You are not fooling anyone.
As always when movies are this tediously blinkered about their own gender and racial subtext, I might be able to give it a grudging pass if it were at least otherwise entertaining. But this is not the case here. Men in Black: International commits an unforgivable crime for this franchise: It’s not funny. Like, not at all. I laughed not once. Also terrible: The plot, about a mole within the MIB organization, kind of doesn’t work if you think about how it was supposed to have come about. But you don’t even have to think about it to wonder how any professional writers came up with a “mystery” that is so obvious that you find yourself thinking that it cannot possibly be that obvious, surely there’s some sort of double bluff being pulled on us. Except no, there is no double bluff. It is simply that stupidly obvious.
Coincidence will be a thing here. Dumb lapses will be a thing here. (Why would such a spectacular and clearly successful villain have such lax security at her lair? This is an insult to her as well as to the audience.) Men in Black: International is so scandalously cheap and lazy that it never engages. It is its own neuralyzer, ensuring that we forget it the moment we’ve seen it.
see also:
• Men in Black (review)
• Men in Black II (review)
• Men in Black III (review)
this makes me sad. i had hopes…
Despite some promising scenes in MiB III, I’ve chosen to consider the MiB series dead to me ever since they chose to get rid of Laurel Weaver (the Linda Fiorentino character in the first movie).
It would have been nice to say that this would be the one movie that would change my mind about that but judging from your review, apparently not…
I would have loved to see more stories with Laurel.
Looooove Linda Fiorentino in the first movie. Watched it again a while ago and was amazed how charismatic and funny she was with such limited screentime. That voice! I miss husky-voiced women in movies. She has a line in the scene where J thinks she’s coming on to him about how the moment women show any sexual independence men jump to erroneous horny-based conclusions. She doesn’t get to finish the line because the D’Onofrio bug tells her to shut up. Felt a bit jarring, kind of like a not-really-conscious nod to feminism without properly getting it. But the intriguing aspect of Laurel that had potential (unrealised) was her disdain for the living and preferring to work in the morgue. Her scientific curiosity at finding the alien body.was remarkably invigorating, as was the wonderful moment where she finds the galaxy ‘on Orion’s belt’. That’s a rare moment of wonder for a woman to savour in such a movie, as the camera stays on her face lighting up with awe at stepping into a larger world. I honestly felt more awe and grandeur at that moment than Ellie Arroway’s pompous journey in Zemeckis’ Contact the same year.
Alternate Universe version of MiB: International: Fiorentino is back as Laurel and is teamed with Tessa Thompson. Nothing against Hemsworth (or “Our Chris”, as I have to say as an Australian) but I’ll have fun imagining that instead of going to see this. (When I was watching MiB I kept thinking of how great Fiorentino was in Romeo is Bleeding, before realising that it was actually Lena Olin in that movie)
Ooooh, them’s fighting words. But that’s a fight for another day. :-)
Hey! Just be happy she did not make a comparison between that scene in MiB — which I remember quite fondly myself — and any scene in the last Ghostbusters movie. :-)
But that too is a fight for another day.
If only because I really don’t wish to see “But Laurel Weaver” on a bingo card.
Agreed. Stay tuned, you guys…
That’s really too damn bad. Do Les Twins get to show off some dance moves, at least? I believe they’re supposed to be alien baddies in this movie; they’re well-known in the hip-hop dance world and are often featured dancers at Beyonce concerts (they were in Homecoming as well).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAQEvp_I_N4
They do dance. But now that fact seems pretty ridiculous. I mean, their dancing has nothing to do with the characters’ alienness.
While I do concur with your statement about Hollywood needing to hire more female screenwriters and directors, I would like to add the word “talented” to that statement. There are enough male hacks running around in Hollywood getting work, there’s no need to add female hacks to that pool. I’d rather replace the male hacks with talented individuals (wishful thinking, I know, but one has to keep hope).
To paraphrase Bella Abzug, feminism will have succeeded when a female schlemiel — or a female hack in Hollywood — is as celebrated and as well paid as male schlemiel. If Hollywood will not insist on talent in men, it shouldn’t insist on talent in women either.
While that is true, I’d personally prefer neither male nor female schlemiel/hacks to pollute the Hollywood movie scene. But I guess that might be too much to ask for.
I guess Sturgeon’s Law will always apply to human endeavors, so why would the movie scene be any different.
Yeah, quality and representation are both important issues, but they’re separate. Whatever reasons Hollywood has for hiring men — be it talent or connections or nepotism or faith in potential or a bottomless capacity for giving second/third/fourth chances — should be the same reasons it has for hiring women, with no additional obstacles due to gender. We can always critique whatever those reasons are, but that’s separate from insisting that they should apply equally to men and women.
We’re all, I hope, in favor of talented filmmakers, but when a man makes a bad film, no one says, “Men just don’t know how to make movies!” and refuses to hire any more men for years afterward.
I eagerly await the day when I am yelling for the thousandth time about a female filmmaker: “SHE’S A GODDAMN HACK WHO ONLY GOT THIS GIG BECAUSE OF HER CONNECTIONS!”
Isn’t this all that happens really? People get jobs because of connections and they either confirm that they are worthy or confirm otherwise? Male or female?
Except white men hold all the power in Hollywood, and they are passing it on almost exclusively to other white men.
Do try to keep up. It’s not that difficult.
Hasenpfeffer Incorporated! Damn, It’s stuck in my head now. That’s a good point – not only will more women will be allowed to recover from failure, more women will be allowed to fail to learn and yet still thrive.
And if the day ever comes when movie theatres are flooded with lousy movies about female superheroes and female spies and female detectives who come out of retirement for one last case, we’ll deal with it the same way we’ve dealt with lousy movies about men. We’ll look for really good critics and find out what they think of the films.
This is one I liked a lot more than you did. I thought it was the best MIB movie since the first one (admittedly not a high bar), and I enjoyed the interplay between the two main characters. I think both Hemsworth and Thompson are wonderful to watch in just about anything, I enjoyed watching them here.
On H failing upward and getting away with it, two notes:
— evidence suggests he was a great agent before he had his memory wiped.
— High T is protecting him. (Note that several of the other agents question why the agency keeps putting up with his antics). But T needs him there for the story that H saved the world to be accepted. (I’m not sure that I buy that it would be accepted so easily, but that’s why T is doing it.)
It doesn’t, though. There’s nothing here about what he was like before. And if neuralyzing people has such a detrimental effect on them, this is an appalling side effect that we should have seen evidence of before. But there has been NO indication that the memory wiping — which all evidence suggests extends to only a few minutes — has any such impact.
White men always have reasons for protecting and promoting other white men. This is what I was talking about when I said, in the review:
The movie could have acknowledged this in lots of ways. The dominance of white men is an alien plot? That could be funny. But the writing here is utter shit.
Glad you liked it, but I just don’t see what you see.
At the expense of other white men? This is a reach that allows people to dunk on white men. High T was only protecting H because he liked him as a person (of course he was also doing the Hive’s bidding). NO race involved here.
PS: I’m black and as much as it would please me to dunk on white men, it is just not necessary here. You can, however, hit me with the patriarchy thing because yes, I am a man. That said, I’m really glad they didn’t take the racism route because the pandering to feminism was a bit too much, the movie did not need to pander to any other movements otherwise it would have been downright intolerable.
I caught a whiff of the immigration debate with the market scene in Marrakesh but it was subtle enough not to cause suspicion.
Oh, you are THISCLOSE to understanding why the patriarchy is bad for most men, too, and why feminism would benefit most men, too. THISCLOSE.
His point should be pretty easy to understand… Blaming white men for everything, or men, is just lazy feminism … The generalization towards “white men have reasons to … ” is completly useless except if its to pander to the tribal nature of low IQ feminist. Its pretty similar to saying “those black people doing XYZ”. In other words, most feminist activist are the opposite of what they claim to be
I understand his point. But he’s wrong.
If white men don’t want to be blamed for everything, they need to step the fuck aside and share power and prestige with the rest of us.
I don’t really think telling all white man to ‘step the fuck down’ is going to make the world a better place.
Feminism is about treating man and women equally. That does not mean that in every company, government of film production there has to be 50% male and 50% female distribution. That is not the point of feminism.
Where did she say “50% male and 50% female”? It doesn’t have to be half-and-half. It would be perfectly fine if men were less than half.
But most feminists would not be fine if men were more than half.
“…would not be fine if men were more than half.”
which they already are in positions of power (politics, relilgion, CEOs, running movie studios…) sheesh. open your eyes.
But most ‘feminists’ are not fine with that . But if the tables were turned would a man have the same right to complain? And what is so wrong about a man who is a CEO or the runner of a film production?
The problem is not that there are men working in the film industry, or any industry. The problem is that, even when there’s a significant increase in the number of women working in the field, they hold fewer—a lot fewer—than 50% of the jobs:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/movies/women-directors-hollywood.html?smid=em-share
This is not a coincidence, and it’s not because of a lack of interest or talent or box-office success from women. Women have actively been prevented from entering the field for decades now.
You seem to be horrified by even the hypothetical idea that a man might be denied employment. Many women are being denied employment every day. If that idea also horrifies you, then you shouldn’t object to a fairly basic suggestion: Maybe everyone should be hired on the basis of their abilities rather than their gender—even if that means a huge reduction of the number of men in Hollywood.
When we have had 4,000 years of women in charge of absolutely everything in the world and men denigrated and treated as less than human, then yes, men would have the right to complain.
Men ARE more than half now. WAY more. This is the problem.
This site is not Feminism 101. Go educate yourself.
I do.
Then you just have like 0 IQ but hey almost all feminists have that.
I love it when trolls project.