Flak Magazine: Review of Men in Black II, 7-18-02

Barry Sonnenfeld has acquired a really bad rap. It's certainly not a surprise, given critical and audience reactions to his last two films, Wild Wild West and Big Trouble. (He also directed the pilot for "The Tick," which at least had critical support.) Men in Black II, which of course rejoins Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as covert government agents making sure that the proles don't know Earth is safe haven for a host of alien refugees, joins this tradition — Metacritic gives it a 43(/100) from critics and a 56 from users; Entertainment Weekly's Critical Mass is C- from the pros and B- from readers. As is often the case when it comes to matters of public and critical consensus, they're both a lot right and a lot wrong.

The extent to which critics and viewers are right goes, more or less, like this: Sonnenfeld's last three movies don't make a lot of sense, and they don't have much structure to speak of. MiiB is particularly bad about this — most stupefyingly, the movie sneaks a ticking-clock destruction-of-earth subplot in out of nowhere; it's literally introduced, without preamble, in an aside from one character to the other, and you're never clear about why, exactly, our planet is doomed, or who's going to destroy it. There's also the matter of the film's motivating action — Serleena, an alien who's equally plant and snake, has come looking for the Light of Zartha so she can destroy the planet Zartha … but the film's opening credits feature Serleena destroying a lot of planets without said light, and, once you know what the Light of Zartha is (think Jewel of the Nile), the connection between one and the other is even more strained. Audiences leave MiiB with a 10-second buzz, which is far from the intoxicating heights of its Sonnenfeld-helmed predecessor.

More strident Sonnenfeld apologists may credit him this devil-may-care approach to narrative as being the last bit of subversion he can wring from being a more-or-less highly successful commercial filmmaker. His biggest financial successes have been with the more … complete pleasures of The Addams Family, Get Shorty and Men in Black, but it's his underperforming films in which he goes really gonzo, cutting loose with the most outré, perverse manifestations of his creativity. It's as if he can only reach his dizziest heights if he dispenses with the narrative niceties that most viewers regard as the bare minimum requirements for an acceptable movie — and so viewers therefore consider these movies unacceptable, even though they offer more legit zaniness than six of their contemporaries. This has become Sonnenfeld's house style; call it "badcap."

But the truth of the matter is that Sonnenfeld's narrative lassitude seems to have a lot more to do with him being, well, lazy. It's seeped into his visual style; he approaches his comedy maxims — deadpan = funny, reaction shots = funny, wide-angle lens = funny — slavishly, not masterfully. If his gags were truly firing on all cylinders, that would be one thing, but they're very often forced, particularly in MiiB. Take the Ti-D-Bowl scene. There's a level at which having Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones flushed down a giant toilet is positively Buñuelian, and it feeds into Sonnenfeld's love of playing with perspective. But he strains too hard for the joke — the bowl-shaped room they're in is porcelain white, the water that sweeps them toward a central drain is cobalt blue, etc., and the movie stops to make sure you pick up on all these details that would be better perceived subliminally. Half-assed executions litter MiiB — Johnny Knoxville's misconceived second head; Tony Shalhoub's whirlygig neurosurgery barber's chair; the cloaked alien who turns out to be made up of smaller versions of himself, each in their own little hovercraft. Even the opening sequence — Robert Graves narrating an "Unsolved Mysteries"-type show about an alien landing and the mythical men in black — plays false; Sonnenfeld gives the show Ed Wood production values when an entirely different, equally lampoonable set of aesthetic values is appropriate.

If you're in a badcap mood, all this plays just fine — mid-tempo moments between definite peaks like Serleena's landing, or the rogue's-gallery menagerie she eventually releases to hunt down the MiB agents, or the civilization living in the Grand Central Station locker, or whenever Frank the pug is onscreen, or when Smith beatboxes with Biz Markie as if they were speaking an alien tongue, blowing Jones' mind (now that's positively inspired). Most high-concept comedies don't have half this much cerebral fluid sloshing around in them, and if MiiB could maintain these heights, particularly while underscored by the legitimate, even moving loneliness that Smith is called upon to express in his early scenes, then all those it-doesn't-make-any-sense sticks-in-the-mud could go watch Mr. Deeds and leave the rest of us to enjoy Sonnenfeld's mania.

But the sad truth is that unless the director gets a better handle on the middle ground between his most delirious creations and the audience's not-illegitmate expectations, he's going to lose the financial freedom he needs to keep making movies with such total abandon (MiiB broke opening-weekend records, but its star is falling fast, with some savvy types speculating it will make less than the original and have trouble turning a profit). Maybe a pocketbook contraction would sharpen Sonnenfeld up, but it might also make him more conservative, less risky. Far better to rally his forces now and hit the next one out of the park; we need a comedian this crazed in the majors.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)