Men in Black: International - I soooo wanted to like this

I loved the original 'Men in Black' film and, contrary to the majority, I really enjoyed the two sequels that followed (I clearly had low expectations for them!).  Plus, who can dislike Chris Hemsworth right now?  He's one of the coolest, most charismatic actors working in Hollywood right now.  I avoided most reviews before I watched this 'International' version, but I sort of heard that the opinion on whether this incarnation was any good was quite split down the middle.

First of all, it is a direct sequel to part 3, i.e. it set in the same universe/timeline, but no appearances from either Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones to be found.  I thought it was worth noting that point in these days of reboots, soft reboots and re-imaginings etc.  Chris Hemsworth is already working for the shadowy agency who protects the general public from knowing about all the alien life coming and going from Earth and Tessa Thompson is the new recruit he takes under his wing when a new case arises.

Apparently, there's something amiss in the MIB's London branch and Tessa Thompson's character, 'M' is sent there to partner up with Chris Hemsworth, 'H' in order to investigate.  You get the usual stuff from a 'MIB' movie, i.e. plenty of slick-looking tech and random aliens wandering around.  I couldn't help but think that the computer effects used to bring these creatures to life didn't look much better than the CGI first utilised in 1997 in the first outing of the franchise.

They soon discover that there's a 'mole' in the agency, working against them from within.  This kind of robs the storyline of a definite bad guy.  The past three movies had a 'main alien' who they have to catch/fight.  I know there are a couple of aliens who - sort of - fit that description, but it's clear that the main 'antagonist' of the story is unseen for the best part.  I wouldn't mind that too much if it wasn't for the fact that - to me - the mole was clearly obvious from the start.  Okay, to be fair it was a guess between two characters, but one was blatantly too annoying/obvious to actually turn out to be the bad guy.

It's fair to say that when watching anything like 'Men in Black' (and almost any science fiction/horror film in general) you need to suspend your disbelief.  Here, you REALLY need to suspend your disbelief.  In fact, about every five minutes something happened where I totally rolled my eyes and shook my head as one plot device unfolded after the other, simply there to move the story to the next location.  People just were able to walk into secret and heavily-guarded facilities at will and no one stopped them.  The (so-called) most secretive agency on Earth basically operated in full view of the public and no one called this out.  Scenes were set in broad daylight in London, Paris and New York involving lasers and spaceships and yet there wasn't a single civilian anywhere to notice any of these out-of-this-world incidents.  Now, I know the two leads have both played superheroes in their time, but these MIB characters are distinctly human.  Although, you might not notice based on the amount of punishment they take and then walk away without so much as a scratch.

There was definite chemistry between the two leads and the fact they had starred together in the Marvel movies certainly helped.  However, I felt that Tessa Thompson's character had a bit of the 'Mary Sue' about her.  No, she wasn't half as bad as 'Rey' from the latest 'Star Wars' films, but 'MIB: International' spends much of its runtime telling us how intelligent she is and showing us just how capable she is.  When she's left to just interact with her co stars she's really watchable and fun, but every scene seems to lead to something which shows us just how great she is and it all seems a little forced.

I'm quite gutted at how many faults I kept picking out.  I'm hardly a fussy devote of films.  Most of my DVD collection contains cheesy horror and sci-fi, plus tonnes of those films that are just 'so-bad-they're-good' types.  For some reason I just felt the writing here was so lazy and people developed new powers that they had never used before just to get themselves out of the latest situation.  I like to think I can suspend my disbelief and enjoy a film, but this one was just a little bit too hard to find believable, even in a world as 'make believe' as this.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back