Smith Month: Mini Review - Men in Black

It’s March, you know what that means, time for an obligatory theme month!

  

Ah, Will Smith, a guy who somehow ends up in some dire awful movies, but maintains a certain charm that keeps him employable, even moving over to the first Netflix blockbuster, Bright (which is not a great movie but I won't be covering here) but like I said, he’s been in a lot of bad movies, and I have a select few I plan to cover. Let’s start with one that isn’t sh*t, Men in Black.

Released in 1997 to financial and critical success, including 3 Academy Award Nominations, this movie would go on to the first of a 3-movie franchise, the rest of which we’ll cover next week.

Will Smith plays a smart-ass streetwise cop who’s running ability grabs the attention of Tommy Lee Jones’ K, Smith is taken to a secret facility that monitor’s alien activity on earth, and there’s a lot of it. And a new threat is arising around a mysterious ‘galaxy’ that the two must resolve or the earth will be destroyed.

The movie does have some great ideas to it, undercover aliens, a special police force revolved around dealing with them and keeping aliens a secret, the memory erasing pen, having Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as leads

And they do really well, it’s a well-crafted script with plenty of interesting action set-pieces as well as some great character banter between our leads. The story takes advantage of the location nicely on occasion and there’s a very New York feel to it all.

The guns are nice too, with guns of varying shapes, sizes and design as you’d expect when the guns come from different planets. It’s like a Ratchet and Clank weapons in real life, before Ratchet and Clank even exited. Unfortunately, the weapons and gadgets are not very well utilised in my opinion, the pen is used frequently but most of their arsenal only gets a single use and it never feels like the duo are using any smart strategies to take out their opponents.

The mystery of the ‘galaxy’ is actually quite a clever one. Having Orion be the name of a cat that followed the one of the bodies in the morgue I quite like. There is also some decent comedy scattered throughout.

But there are a couple of missteps along the way. The one that stood out the most to me is the ending. J and K only had their first mission together in this movie, the idea that K would leave after that may sound good on paper, but ultimately means J is left without any mentor figure that he can rely on. And before you point out any other member of the organisation, note that they had one or two lines each and no real interaction with him.

The effects also don’t hold up, but it’s been over 20 years so it’s forgiveable

Men in Black is a solid movie with a fun premise, charismatic and funny leads, some good jokes and decent action, it stumbles a little nearer the end but it’s too fun a ride for me to care that much about it.

Rating 80/100