Krishna
I am a fan of MIB from the time the first movie came. I should have known that ultimately sequels go bad but it is still totally disheartening to see something this fun done so totally wrong.
The original MIB was a lot of fun to watch – the premise is great, and the various aliens you meet at unexpected circumstances and the easy relationship between Agent K (ok Kay) and Agent J (Jay) are amazing. The humour goes hand in hand with the story. I know the story and the premise are silly and unbelievable, but it takes a lot of talent to make the silly work. (Think Shrek for example). The original MIB clicked big time. Then they made the sequel MIB 2, which was fun too, if not right upto the mark of the original. The third movie lifted it up an inch further. In MIB 3, what saved the movie was not the villain Boris the Animal but the guy who sees multiple universes (Griffin) and also the explosive ending.
And that movie ends in a way where you feel that they have done everything they can in this genre. (Rather like How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World) and so you think they are done.
Oh no. They wanted to start a whole new story with a whole new actor cast. And they roped in Chris Hemsworth (of Thor Fame) to play Agent H and a rookie partner Agent M. You also have, surprisingly, Liam Neeson as Agent High T. (Yes, I get the pun, but what you should know is that the story is a lot worse than the weak pun).
Nothing wrong with it, except that they completely wasted the whole movie. Yes, there are aliens – and some of them borrowed from the earlier movies (saving modelling costs). There are a ton of cliché moments where you can’t believe that your favourite movie has been trashed so badly that it is barely recognizable as an MIB movie.
There is not much of a story. Agent High T seems to favour the two bumbling agents H and M (Yes Henry and Molly, if you must know) in spite of severe warnings against them by Agent C who seems to have a constant grudge against them. They in turn dislike him. You do expect Agent C to be the rotten egg when they discover that there is a mole in the organization. Nope.
Molly comes across as a brash but not so brainy girl and comes more across as an entitled girl who wants to get everywhere by being argumentative (supposed to be a forceful character but comes across as annoying).
She goes where she is not supposed to go and sees what a rookie is not supposed to see and the villains in this case are two men who seem to be made of fire, but assume ordinary (Arabic looking?) guys. They, of course, are indestructible until, ahem, they are. Go figure.
Agent H fights aliens, sleeps with aliens and generally is a bumbling fellow (no trace of the Will Smith nonchalance). There is a totally obnoxious Pawn with an equally annoying Queen – who mercifully dies quickly – and this one is the sidekick/ comedic relief to the duo. He makes all lame jokes about being a pawn and a slave and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
A Jababian royal is being asked to be protected by H and M, but they goof off and the royal is killed, but not handing over a secret powerful weapon (which is the target of the fire people) to M “because he does not trust anyone in MIB now”. Huh? “They have changed”. And he can sense it.
You can too, sense the bullshit.
They mean an alien living as a beard on the chin of an arms dealer (Don’t ask) and they get – wait for it – something that looks rather like the motorbike of the MIB 3 movie. Come on! Also the “original” stuff, in an earlier scene, they pull out weapons of gradually increasing power (why? Why not use the most powerful directly, especially when you are under threat?) from various parts of an ordinary looking car.
All of it falls flat. This is one of the worst MIBs I have seen, and this has the distinction of making an erstwhile fan like me to think twice about going to the next MIB in the series, if there is one after this fiasco.
2/ 10
– – Krishna (July 2019)