Psycho's Movie Reviews #186: Men In Black 2 (2002)

Men in Black II (stylized as MIIB) is a 2002 American science fiction action comedy film directed by Barry Sonnenfeld and written by Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro. A sequel to Men in Black (1997), which in turn is loosely based on the Marvel Comics series The Men in Black by Lowell Cunningham, the film stars Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith reprising their roles from the first film, with Lara Flynn Boyle, Johnny Knoxville, Rosario Dawson, Tony Shalhoub, and Rip Torn in supporting roles. It was also the final appearance of Torn in the series (although he did make a brief uncredited appearance in Men in Black 3), as he died on July 9, 2019. The film centres on Agent J trying to find and recruit Agent K back into the organization because only K knows how to deal with the latest threat to Earth's security, but restoring that knowledge requires restoring the memories J wiped from K's mind at the end of the previous film.

Men in Black II was released worldwide on July 3, 2002, by Columbia Pictures, receiving mixed reviews from critics and grossing $441.8 million against a budget of $140 million. The film was followed by Men in Black 3 in 2012, and MIB: International in 2019.

Plot

In July 2002, Agent J has become a top agent but has developed a rep for neuralyzing partners he feels aren't emotionally able to cope with the work. When he is called to investigate the murder of an alien, Ben, at his pizzeria, the waitress, Laura Vasquez, tells him that the murderers are Serleena, a shapeshifting, plant-like Kylothian who has taken the form of a Victoria's Secret lingerie model, and her two-headed servant Scrad and Charlie. Laura says they were looking for something called the Light of Zartha. J is strongly attracted to Laura, and in violation of MiB rules, does not neuralyze her to erase her memories.

J finds that little is known about the Light of Zartha, except that it is immensely powerful. As he investigates the crime, every lead points to his former partner and mentor, Agent K, who was neuralyzed upon retirement five years previously and remembers nothing of his MIB service. In Truro, Massachusetts, where K is now the town's postmaster, J convinces him by proving that all of his fellow postal workers are aliens. Back in New York City, Serleena, along with Scrad and Charlie, launches an attack on MIB headquarters before K's neuralyzation can be reversed, but Jack Jeebs has an illegal deneuralyzer in his basement. K eventually regains his memories, but remembers that years before, he neuralyzed himself specifically to erase what he knew of the Light of Zartha and those memories have not returned. As a precaution, he left himself a series of clues.

At the pizzeria, they find a locker key. J and K fear for Laura's safety and hide her with the worms. The key opens a locker in Grand Central Station where a society of tiny aliens, who worship K as their deity, guard their most sacred relics: K's wristwatch and video store membership card. At the store, as J and K watch a fictionalized story of the Light of Zartha, K remembers the Zarthan Queen Lauranna long ago entrusted Men in Black with safeguarding the Light from her nemesis, Serleena, who followed Lauranna to Earth and killed her. After hiding the Light, a grief-stricken K neuralyzed himself, to bury his sadness, and to ensure that he would never reveal its hiding place. K still cannot remember where he hid it nor what the Light actually looks like. Thinking it might be Laura's bracelet, he only remembers that it must return to Zartha soon or else both Earth and Zartha will be destroyed.

At the worms' apartment, they find that Laura has been captured by Serleena. With the worms, they counterattack MIB headquarters, freeing Laura and the other agents. Serleena attempts to retaliate by chasing them with a spaceship through New York but is eaten by Jeff, a gigantic worm alien living in the New York City Subway.

Laura's bracelet leads J and K to the roof of a skyscraper where a ship stands ready to transport the Light back to Zartha. K reveals that Laura is the daughter of Lauranna (and, it is implied, K's daughter) and she's also the Light. K convinces J and Laura that she must go to Zartha to save both her planet and Earth from destruction. Serleena, who has absorbed Jeff and taken his form, attempts to snatch the ship carrying Laura as it lifts off, but J and K blast her out of the sky. Since all of New York City has just witnessed this battle in the skies over the metropolis, K activates a giant neuralyzer in the torch of the Statue of Liberty.

Back at MIB headquarters, J finds that K and Chief Zed have relocated the tiny locker-dwelling aliens to his Men in Black locker hoping to give him some perspective. When J suggests showing the miniature creatures that their universe is bigger than a locker, K shows J that the human universe is itself a locker within an immense alien train station.

Production

Despite some initial involvement from David Koepp (who left to work on Panic Room and Spider-Man), the script was written by Robert Gordon and later revised by Barry Fanaro, who added pop culture references, something which Gordon had deliberately avoided. Sonnenfeld took issue with the producers' focus on the love story between Will Smith's and Rosario Dawson's characters, saying that "I learned on Wild Wild West that audiences didn't want to see Will as the straight man. And until Tommy comes back into the movie, by definition Will's the straight man." Fanaro condensed the first part of the film and brought Agent K in earlier.

Principal photography began on June 11, 2001 and ended on September 23, 2001. The climax of the story was originally filmed against a backdrop of the twin towers of the original World Trade Center; but after the September 11 attacks, the climactic scene was refilmed. Other scenes incorporating views of the twin towers likewise were edited, or reshot.

Supervising sound editor Skip Lievsay used a Synclavier to recreate and improve the original recording of the neuralyzer sound effect from the first film (which was the sound of a strobe flash as it recycles) by removing some distortion. For some of the scenes with the Serleena creature, the sound crew "took tree branches, put them inside a rubber membrane and pushed that around and added some water." For the special effects scene where the subway train is attacked by Jeff the Worm, a specially designed vise was used to crush a subway car and make it look as if it had been bitten in half.

The score was composed by Danny Elfman, again.

Release/Reception/Box Office

Men In Black II was released on DVD and VHS on November 26, 2002, and on Blu-ray on May 1, 2012. It came with an alternate ending where J is sent to the homeworld of the aliens from Grand Central Station. The entire Men In Black series was released on 4K UHD Blu-Ray on December 5, 2017.

A video game partly based on the film was released in 2002, titled Men in Black II: Alien Escape.

On Rotten Tomatoes, Men in Black II has an approval rating of 39% based on 197 reviews, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Lacking the freshness of the first movie, MIB 2 recycles elements from its predecessor with mixed results." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 49 out of 100, based on reviews from 37 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.

A. O. Scott of The New York Times said, "Within the trivial, ingratiating scope of its ambition... the sequel is pleasant enough" and, noting the vast array of aliens designed by Rick Baker, said that the film "really belongs to Mr. Baker." A review in The Hindu called the film "worth viewing once." A review from Digital Media FX magazine praised the spaceships as looking realistic, but criticized many of the simpler visual effects, such as the moving backgrounds composited behind the car windows using blue-screen (which it called a throwback to the special effects of earlier decades). In August 2002, Entertainment Weekly placed the Worm Guys among their list of the best CG characters, and said that enlarging the roles of Frank the Pug and the Worm Guys in Men in Black II was beneficial for the "tiring franchise."

The film was nominated for a Visual Effects Society Award for "Best Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture" but lost to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The film also earned a Razzie Award nomination for Lara Flynn Boyle as Worst Supporting Actress.

Released theatrically on July 3, 2002, Men in Black II was number one on its opening weekend, grossing $52,148,751, beating out The Powerpuff Girls Movie. The film held the number one position in its second weekend with revenue of $24,410,311, a 53.2% decrease from the previous weekend. The third weekend saw a 40.4% decrease, with box office of $14,552,335, coming in at number three.

In its fourth weekend, the film was at fourth place, with revenue of $8,477,202. Men in Black II fell out of the top ten after five weekends. After sixty-two days of release in North America, Men in Black II had grossed $190,418,803. 43.1% of the film's worldwide revenue of $441,818,803 came from North America.

Budget $140 million

Box office $441.8 million

My Review

The general idea is a prodigy of simplicity: to turn a whole set of successful science-fiction dramas or romances or adventures into a full-blown comedy and make all these frightening things that make you dream of a world that will never exist like in Star Wars or in Star Trek hilariously funny so that the audience just never stops laughing. Steven Spielberg adds to that a direct allusion to Back to the future but within the science fiction space adventure genre and it becomes phony more than funny, with me grown up meeting me four years old.

The first two films are really funny because they remain within one layer of time. The third one becomes something different, nostalgic, sentimental even, and that breaks the fun to turn it into fear: the fear the negated past or the traumatized past may turn the future which is our present into a nightmare, a PTSS case of time travel trauma, something like PTTTSS, Post Time Travel Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Welcome to the asylum for deeply disturbed minds and brains.

The most attractive and fascinating aspect is the phenomenal palette and variety of extra-terrestrials you are navigating among. Obviously all of them are just the figment of the imaginations of a band of deranged probably young people generally called artists though there might be a few older ones who are more perverse than deranged, or perversely corrugated. You cannot find them serious. They are all of them just impossible mixtures of all kinds of living gadgets, except in the last one where one of them is well hidden in a human body and is deadly frightening, not funny at all.

The next element that is striking is the role of the Black man in black, just recruited in the first film, trained and excellently performing and competent in the second film and growing melancholy and sentimental in the last film when he sees himself when he was four, when his father was killed under his adult eyes and when with a magic flash the little boy will only remember his father was a hero. And of course it is his partner who erases the truth from the little boy's memory, the partner he meets again in the present some seconds later at the end of the film. That episode brings the saga to an end because the fun has been drunk right down to the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup.

We all, absolutely all of us, have rebuilt the image of the father we had, in pink or in black, in celestial blue or in fiery red, but what we remember of our father is nothing but a mental reconstruction, a Lego reconstruction. All the pieces are true, real and absolutely precise, but the pieces have been reassembled in any creative or traumatic way and that's the image we have of the man we call our father. That's normal. That's natural. That's the truth if there is one under the sun. Our memory is selective. In fact, we remember everything without fault but our conscious memory is the Lego construction I have just spoken of.

You may have in some drawer, or in your pocket, something that is attached to your father in a way or another and that reached you when you were three or four. This thing is attached to you and you are attached to it in an unbreakable union and yet you don't really know why you're attached to it and it is attached to you. It might be a sentence that comes back regularly and that makes you sick with fear or happy with instant bliss, and yet you do not know where it comes from, except that it comes from a long, long time ago and you still have it in your mind because it was a positive or negative trauma, and, mind you, there are positive happy traumas that have the same power as negative ones, except that this power makes you excel and not run away and hide under your bed.

If you want to have some fun in an environment of extraterrestrial monsters, with some dangerous situations and beings and many happy just in time right in time epiphanies and salvations, you have to let yourself slide into these hairy and over-twisted stories and forget about your bills and the fact that the heating does not work. You'll survive since these crazy characters did survive.

This is a good sequel, better than I expected it to be... honestly I like this one more than the first, in fact it's my favourite of the trilogy. I was disappointed about a few things including the time length. This movie takes place five years after the first movie. Agent J has to bring back Agent K because only K knows about the mysterious "Light" object." They have to prevent the evil Serleena from stealing this object. Some of their allies include the famous worms and the singing Frank the pug. The cast did a great job with their parts. I liked Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as the Men in Black dudes. Lara Flynn Boyle did a pretty good job as the wicked Serleena. I also have to give heads up to Johnny Knoxville as he proves that he can act. The music by Danny Elfman is great and appropriate for this movie. The movie has some comedy too. It was nice to crack up here or there. I was displeased at the time length. This movie was way too short for a movie in a genre such as Sci-Fi. Overall, this is a great sequel and I recommend this. 8.9/10

{The theme to this one is great}