Will Smith saves the planet again ... this time in a good film!

Rating: 9/10 (5 February 2010)

After the horribly cheesy "Independence Day" of the previous year, it was great to see the actor that saved that movie from being completely unwatchable - Will Smith - get a chance to save the planet in a quality film. From the opening of the film where "Mikey", an illegal alien from another planet is disguised as an illegal alien from another country, to the end when we see the earth just as a marble in a pouch of many belonging to an extraterrestrial being, I found this film to be thought provoking, original, and very funny.
Tommy Lee Jones (Agent K) and Will Smith (Agent J) are perfect in their roles. Not since Lenny Briscoe and Mike Logan were partners on "Law and Order" has the young cop/old cop routine been done so well with such great chemistry and deadpan humor. All of the supporting roles work too. Rip Torn is great as Zed, the head of the secret government organization - the "Men In Black" - who are in charge of overseeing the visits of extraterrestrials who have chosen to establish contact with earth and in some cases become semi-permanent residents of this planet. His great one-liners include telling a group of rejected job applicants - who really don't know what kind of job they've applied for - "Congratulations gentlemen. You are all we've come to expect from years of government training".
Some of the rank and file employees of the agency are aliens themselves. Unmotivated and not particularly loyal, they enjoy hanging out in the break room drinking coffee, smoking heavily, and collecting cheap miniatures of the Statue of Liberty. Vincent D'Onofrio is also outstanding in the dual role of Edgar, a human who gets eaten by a malicious alien cockroach, and also as the cockroach himself as he tools around New York City in his "brand new Edgar suit" - Edgar's skin - in an attempt to appear human while trying to start an intergalactic war.
Any human who happens to encounter an alien won't remember it thanks to the neuralizer - a device the size of a fountain pen - that the "Men In Black" administer to erase any resulting memories. This includes employees of the agency themselves, should they choose to quit or retire. The underlying purpose of all of this covering up makes sense when Smith's character, during his orientation session, tells Tommy Lee Jones that he thinks that people could handle the truth about aliens living among them. Jones' (Agent K's) response is: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals and you know it." This is hard to argue with when you think about the acts that people throughout history have performed as a mob that they would never have done as individuals. I really enjoyed this film, and its smart humor has held up over the years. I think in the future many will wonder, as I still do, why this film didn't get a nod at the Academy Awards other than its award for best makeup, at the very least for the screenplay.