Men In Black: International (2019)

It appears France got tired of not getting its cities destroyed, and wanted a sweet, sweet piece of that disaster-porn pie.
Far be it from a Hollywood studio to ignore the financial gains of filming in a far-off land, “Men In Black: International” (2019) mostly takes place in Paris, giving the U.S. a chance to not be the focal point for alien-based destruction.

As expected from this franchise, it’s up to two agents whose names are single letters to save the world from various alien shenanigans while managing to stay completely secret and out of the public eye.
MIB:I is a reboot/sequel (seboot? requel?) to the previous three MIB films starring Will Smith, who was absolutely nowhere to be found here, or even mentioned. At one point there was a painting on the wall that may or may not have been of Agents K and J from the first movie, but it’s a glancing scene with no impact.
You can tell this wasn’t meant to be a hard reboot by the fact that the ever-gorgeous Emma Thompson was in it, reprising her role as Agent O from MIB3, even though just about everything else is new.

The movie itself was 114 minutes of eye rolls.
Zero character development. A plot line that we’ve all seen countless times. An entirely un-climactic ending, as “anti-climactic” would imply there had been build-up from which we were let down. This movie didn’t bother to build anything, other than my desire to get up and leave the theater.

At one point, the stupidly-named Agent High-T (Liam Neeson) says “The universe has a way of getting you where you need to be, exactly when you need to be there,” which is an absolute cop-out, as the director clearly used that as their excuse to shoe-horn in whatever deus ex machina event or mcguffin item they needed in order to move the plot forward, instead of actually figuring out how tell the story.
You know, the one thing a movie is supposed to be able to do.

Let’s touch on the characters for a moment: take some to remind yourself of every single ‘annoying comedic relief’ trope character you’ve seen. Now imagine making an entire movie where every character behaves that way.
The one exception was Agent O.
Barely.
It’s like the entire script was written where the characters were supposed to be quipping at each other, but the writing wasn’t witty enough for that. It was just two hours of everything being annoying.
Considering that Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson played across from each other in 2017’s hilarious “Thor: Ragnarok,” their stunning lack of on-screen chemistry here was pretty incredible.
Pawny (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) was somehow the annoying character in a movie entirely built on annoying characters. Which is a shame, because some of his lines were pretty funny, but it would have required the rest of the film to grow up for that comedy to shine through. As it stands, Pawny was just a drop in an ocean of bleh.
Somehow even the set and scenery felt annoying. The fancy car wasn’t fun this time around. The weird futuristic MIB facilities were uninspired. The guns were extra chrome and that’s it. The “bad guys” weren’t even bad, once it was revealed who the real villain was.

While you may not remember it, the Men In Black series does have a soundtrack that they’ve been using throughout the series. Fortunately, the director decided to keep it. While it’s certainly not music I’d listen to for fun, the fact that it’s there and used plentifully was a nice touch.

There were a few references to the previous films, like a cameo of the “Cricket” pistol from MIB1, or the gang of skinny aliens from MIB2, and I can at least be thankful that the director didn’t feel the need to cram in anything more than passing visuals.

The graphics were not good. At all. I don’t know how we’re in 2019 and big-budget studios are still knee-capping their own CGI budget in movies that rely on CGI. There were a few aliens that looked right (you know, as “right” as the digital manifestation of a fever-dream can be), but an unfortunately high number of them looked so clearly edited-in around the human actor counterparts. It was impressively bad.

This movie’s existence is weird. It came seven years after MIB3 and obviously wasn’t designed just to be a cash-grab. Yet, somehow, it lacked any of the creativity to make it better than your average SyFy channel original movie.
I have to assume a better movie was described during the initial pitch meeting, because I can’t believe any exec would sit through a narration of that and green-light it.
This wasn’t good. It’s not worth your time and it wasn’t a valuable addition to the franchise.