Summer School: 'Men in Black II' (2002)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

As much as I was a big fan of the original Men in Black and of director Barry Sonnenfeld's work at the time, I don't quite remember what I thought of Men in Black II when I first saw it. It came three years after Sonnenfeld and Will Smith's notorious flop Wild Wild West (which I still haven't seen), and my expectations were probably a bit lower by that time. Still, I don't remember particularly disliking it, but watching it again so soon after rewatching the first movie, I can see how significant a step down it really is. Nearly every element of the sequel is worse this time around, all the way through Smith's typically silly plot song during the closing credits.

Even the chemistry between Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as MIB agents Jay and Kay suffers, since it takes nearly half the movie for Kay to get back in action. The rather sweet ending of the first movie, in which Kay has his memory wiped so he can return to a simple existence with the love of his life, has to be undone, but first Jay has to encounter the latest world-ending alien threat, here in the form of an alien queen (Lara Flynn Boyle) who is after an all-powerful MacGuffin hidden on Earth. Kay was the one originally responsible for hiding it, so Jay has to bring him in and get his memories restored.

The easy chemistry that defined Jay and Kay's relationship last time around only surfaces in bits and pieces in the second half, and before that Smith has to carry the movie on his own (Linda Fiorentino's character, who was set up as his partner at the end of the first movie, gets written out in a single line). He's paired first with a dopey new agent played by Patrick Warburton and then with Frank the alien pug, who's one example of how this movie takes a clever background element from the original and runs it into the ground (it does the same with the "worm guys" who hang around the MIB office, and the idea of celebrities as aliens). The jokes are mostly strained and awkward (the Michael Jackson cameo especially has aged very, very poorly), Boyle's Serleena is a pretty ineffective villain (and Johnny Knoxville as her two-headed henchman is even worse), the romantic subplot between Jay and a pizza parlor employee (Rosario Dawson) is useless, and the rampant product placement is cringe-inducing.

Perhaps worst of all, the special effects are terrible, almost universally unconvincing and substantially worse than the effects in the previous movie. Maybe the problem is the overreliance on CGI (the original had quite a few practical effects), but even the CGI looked better last time around. The most amusing part of the movie is the opening clip from an In Search Of-style supernatural mystery show hosted by Peter Graves (playing himself) that lays out the back story in intentionally cheesy, low-budget fashion. And even that gets run into the ground, played again almost in its entirety later in the movie when Kay needs to be caught up. Running barely 80 minutes before the credits, MIB2 is a disappointing, half-hearted follow-up to one of the most entertaining summer blockbusters of the '90s.