2002 sequel
Rating: 10/20
Plot: An alien threat requires Will Smith to pull Tommy Lee Jones out of retirement and restore his memory.
I lost track of what was happening in this movie because I stopped caring. The best thing about this movie is Tommy Lee Jones, both as a post office employee oblivious of his former life and the grumpy Man in Black we knew from the first movie. He plays curmudgeonly as well as anybody, and his lines–with help from his delivery of those lines–are the funniest parts of this unfunny movie. Will Smith brings his usual charisma but just doesn’t have a lot to work with here. I enjoy Rip Torn even if his character is a little too Tommy-Lee-Jonesish, and the ubiquitous Patrick Warburton is really the perfect actor to play a bumbling government official. Tony Shalhoub brings back his character from the first movie while David Cross plays, I think, a completely different guy.
I didn’t care at all for Lara Flynn Boyle as the tentacled bad gal, Serleena. The tough apathy she plays the character with just feels like a cliche. And I really hated Johnny Knoxville in a dual role. He’s annoying as both a big head and a little head, and he really overacts, trying to squeeze every drop of funny out of a script that just doesn’t work at all. He’s dreadfully bad.
The humor feels a little forced to me. Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart cameos are just odd, a gag about a “Ballchinnian” is just as funny as it is in Movie 43, and a beatbox-off between the Fresh Prince and Biz Markie seems out of place. There’s a talking dog, of course, and that character is just as annoying as you think it would be. I enjoyed a line about nearly everybody who works in a post office being an alien, but it seems like an easy target. For a movie this cartoonish–I mean, Will Smith gets thrown all over the place, but nobody ever gets hurts–this really isn’t that much fun. Any fun I might have been having was abducted when that stupid dog started singing “I Will Survive” and, about five minutes later, “Who Let the Dogs Out?” It seemed to be a lot of time to waste in a movie that was only about 90 minutes.
A lot of the problem is that the effects are terrible. Rick Baker does some alien work, and a lot of the alien design is creative and cool, but anytime CGI is used, it’s pretty much a disaster. Look no further than a giant centipede thing in the subway during a big opening action sequence for proof. I’m fine with filmmakers being ambitious, but watching this subway scene and a lot of the other action sequences in the movie really took me out of the story. I understand it’s all supposed to be cartoony anyway, but this stuff didn’t even look as good as a cartoon.
I do like that there’s a character named Dog Poop. Dog Poop’s played by the late Sonny Tipton. I haven’t checked any obituaries to see if “played Dog Poop in the popular film Men in Black II” made its way into any of them.
Oh, and I liked some of Danny Elfman’s score.
I saw this because I have to watch the sequel for my Time Travel Movie Fest. I hope it’s better than this one.