Review of Men in Black II (2002) by Matthew F — 27 Nov 2012

Well, this is not how you make a sequel. This franchise had so much opportunity to extend upon its universe and possibly become the perfect franchise for me. It had awkward but fun CGI, weird side characters, great but fun chemistry, Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, cool alien design, energy, and a type of campy charm that only big budget, silly concept films can pull off (I'm not saying low budget camp films don't have their own type of charm, but their different.

) It could have been my perfect guilty pleasure film series. For a little part it did. Smith's and Jones characters and the action scenes are as fun as ever. Unfortunately, it got a lot extremely wrong.

For example there are no new characters that are any interesting. The villains are bore and annoy with, a hint of grossness. The main girl is bland as anything. She is a lot worse than the girl from the first movie, and that is saying a lot because the first girl was boring also.

There was also some annoying product placement in the film, I mean I have never seen product placement this pointless. A Burger King in the Agency, the worms playing Twister, there were more but I don't remember.

The number one thing that this movie gets wrong is the plot. My gosh is the plot awful. It wouldn't be so bad but it had one of the worst plot lines ever conceived. They knew they couldn't get the chemistry between Jones and Smith unless they got them together again.

Unfortunately, they did the next worse thing to killing him off in the last film, erase his memory. So in this one they spent half of the movie trying to get his memory back. There is no way to do this without it feeling extremely forced.

In fact this is probably the most forced plot I have ever seen in my life. They need him, they pull the poor man out of retirement, they find a machine that can get his memory back, he's back. I mean that is weak, forced, and cruel all at the same time.

Couldn't they do a short that aired on TV that explained it so they could move on to an interesting plot. Well I did have some fun watching it, It had a lot of good elements, and at least it didn't have the godawful writing of "Wild Wild West" (which should be redone, it also had some great ideas.

) Overall I would recommend this if it wasn't for the godawful plot.