Men in Black II - More of the same

Er, where do I begin... probably best to start with the first ‘Men in Black’ film.  It starred Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as two shady government agents who track down and keep an eye on all alien life forms coming and going from our fair green planet.  That basically sums up the sequel, too.  Not just the plot, but pretty much the entire film.

In the first film, an alien with bad intentions crash lands on Earth (happens in Part II as well), the alien takes on human form (check), the alien wants a mythical device to make them all powerful (applicable to both films), if said alien gets their hands on said device then the Earth will be destroyed (yup, MIB2 has that one, too).

The first film was awesome.  It was funny, charming and basically fun for all the family.  The chemistry between wise-crackin’ Will Smith and poe-faced Tommy Lee Jones carried it through perfectly.  In fact, it’s the two leads who make the sequel worth watching.  If it wasn’t for their on-screen performances, it really wouldn’t be worth the effort.

It’s ‘Men in Black by the numbers.’ The jokes are good, the performances are good, so if you can excuse the fact that the writers have pretty much taken the script from the first film and churned it out as a sequel, then you should like this outing enough to sit through it.  Plus it’s short, if that’s a bonus.  Perhaps the real drawback is that the CGI hasn’t held up that well over the years.  Almost every (alien-related) scene was done on computers and now you can see the green-screen behind the actors as they do their best to act against nothing.

I guess the only major 'addition' to the film is more use of the (alien) dog, 'Frank.' Although he was in the first film, he gets more lines here and, as much as I hate to admit that talking animals interacting with humans is always worth a watch, he is fun to observe and cute as hell.  I know that Marvel movies get critercised for lacking in 'the baddie department' (not including Loki, of course), but if you think they're bad then the 'Men In Black' movies really go all out on lacking character development.  Whichever evil alien they have to fight that's about it.  The bad guy is evil.  End of.  here, it's Lara Flynn Boyle who wants to get her manicured hands on a device to take over the universe.  She looks hot and glares at people, then kills them with CGI tentacles.  That's the extent of her involvement in the film.

It’s another 'Men in Black' film.  If you liked the first one and don’t care about lazy writing (or perhaps you want to call it ‘sticking to what the writers know sells?’) then you should like this.  It may hardly be a classing, but it's still (a computer generated) head and shoulders over 'Men In Black: International!'

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that