Slick, polished and very entertaining - 76%

Rating: 7/10 (6 June 2012)

With the third installment now out in cinemas, it seems like a lifetime ago that I went to the cinema to watch this. One thing that did strike me watching it today was how rough the CG looked but I suppose a Blu-Ray special edition can probably fix that. Other than that, there is very little I would change as this remains a highly enjoyable sci-fi comedy that isn't afraid of laughing at itself although it laughs too hard at times.
Tommy Lee Jones plays K, an undercover agent with a mysterious organisation that monitors all alien activity on Earth and, if necessary, cleaning up the mess. So when cocky NYPD officer James Edwards (Will Smith) encounters an alien on the streets of New York, K takes it upon himself to recruit Edwards into MiB. But once Edwards has become the black-suited J, their section chief Z (Rip Torn) has an assignment for them - a nasty bug in the ungainly form of redneck farmer Edgar (Vincent D'Onofrio) has made his way to the Big Apple in order to wreck an intergalactic peace conference between warring species - a war that now has Earth in its sights.
This isn't a movie to think about too much because all you'll find are plot holes. Instead, what you'll find is a damn good blockbuster with all the special effects, pyrotechnics and one-liners you'll need to satisfy most tastes. There's even a damsel in distress in the shapely form of Linda Fiorentino but what really makes "Men In Black" stand out is its tongue-in-cheek nature - when a screen showing known alien activity appears and one of the subjects is Sylvester Stallone, you know that taking this seriously simply isn't an option. Jones has rarely been as good as he is here, maintaining a humourless and unflappable face at the digital chaos around him. Smith provides most of the laughs, as you'd expect, and his interplay with Jones is also good. It's almost a shame that the CG swamps everything else although it is looking a touch dated in places. The short aliens with the coffee and the little green one inside the dying old man do look somewhat crude these days, no doubt something that the new film is happy to address.
My only real issues with "Men In Black" are the all-too-short duration which crowbars the plot into place and which make the film feel rushed and the highly polished feel to the thing. Every scene, prop and line of dialogue feels sanitised as though director Barry Sonnenfeld went through about fifty takes of each shot until it felt right. MiB headquarters, for example, felt less like a busy hub of technical innovation and administration and more like a forgotten set from some Sixties sci-fi show. None of it felt genuine or real and suspension of belief was almost impossible. But as I said, that's what you get if you look at "Men In Black" from a critic's point of view instead of a ticket-purchasing member of the audience, which I was all those years ago. This is still worth taking a look at because in terms of entertainment, "Men In Black" does a perfectly good job and if nothing else, it is a humorous riposte to an all-too-often serious genre so if you're not bothered by the likes of "The X Files" or "Millennium" then give this a look.