Mutants back for more

10 April 2012

Everything and everyone in director Barry Sonnenfeld's blockbuster, save our two heroes (Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones), is capable of changing into something (or some Thing) else. It's a film you can't keep your eyes on long enough to register one character before he, she or it has morphed into a monstrosity, beginning with Serleena (Lara Flynn Boyle), the carnivorous extraterrestrial, who steps out of what looks like a Philippe Starck lemon squeezer and assumes bimbo proportions as a Victoria's Secret lingerie model, before morphing into a tentacular can of worms and indiscriminately ingesting anyone who can be spared from the cast - most of 'em.

Industrial Light and Magic is a clever outfit of SFX merchants, and Rick Baker is the world's best monster-maker, but, like Serleena, they don't know the limits of their own appetites. Their phantasmagoria is now the whole show. The sardonic, otherworldly wit of the first Men in Black is buried beneath a non-stop nightmare blizzard of computerised and animatronic alien visitants who quickly lose their initial shock value by sheer numbers.

An exception is Frank the Pug, a talking pug dog played by "Mushu" and voiced by Tim Blaney. He outwits everything his keeper, Agent Jay (Will Smith), can wisecrack. A dog that looks like a dog and stays looking like a dog (minus a fondness for chomping on a cigar) and upstages one of the nominal human stars, while making all the other splendiferous opticals look overblown, confirms that Industrial Light and Magic's input has reached a dead-end.

The early scenes are simplest and, while the novelty is freshest, the best. Like Smith's mission to bring Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) back into active service from retirement as an up-state postmaster. Every single employee in the mailroom is revealed as a bulbous-headed, bug-eyed mutant. But then, as Smith says with factual validity, "The US postal service is run by aliens."

The rest of the surprises are either hits or ho-hums: the best of them, the monster bug at the beginning that lives in the NY subway and eats up a commuter train, or the luggage locker at Grand Central Station that's opened to reveal an Albert Hall-size chorus of worshipful mini-mutants all hymning The Star-Spangled Banner.

But Smith and Jones are so frequently subsumed into the SFX that they barely register as independent characters. And what was hip the first time round is now old hat. Their Ray-Bans, black suits and ties now look as uncool as any funeral parlour's staff uniform, and I swear Jones took a bet that he could go through the entire film without once altering his expression of deep-freeze distaste.

At 88 minutes (81, if you don't count the credits), is Men In Black II really a " blockbuster"? It's underlength, overweight and it gives short measure.

Men In Black II
Cert: certPG

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