Men in Black International Review

This year for cinema has been and will continue to be the year of final chapters. "Avengers: Endgame" was the final chapter in the Infinity Gauntlet story arc. "Dark Phoenix" was the final chapter of the main timeline for Fox's X-Men franchise. At the end of the year, "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" will be the final chapter of the Star Wars' main saga. And now this past weekend, "Men in Black International" became the final Men in Black movie. Granted, when it comes to Men in Black, this was certainly not the intention for Sony. In fact, the intention was the exact opposite. "International" was trying to reboot the saga by making a spin-off sequel in a different area of the world. But when your seven-years-later reboot ends up being a complete non-starter in just about all aspects, that's the end. Sony can try to make a fifth film if they want, but the world has spoken and said, "We don't care about this franchise." As a studio, that's when you cut your losses and move onto the next project. Because, yeah, this franchise feels dead at this point. Now I'm not going to say "International" is as bad as that 24 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes seems to suggest, but I'm also not going to say this movie is worth it because it's a fairly lifeless piece of cinema that just kinda exists.

Before I dive into the movie itself, I want to take a second to explore what went wrong here. The original "Men in Black" back in 1997 was the second highest grossing film of that year, behind only the behemoth that was "Titanic." Five years later, "Men in Black II" also did fairly well as the eighth highest grossing film of 2002. Even "MIB 3" in 2012 did fairly well given that it was sandwiched directly between "The Avengers" and "The Dark Knight Rises" that summer. All three of these movies opened in the $50 million range. Adjusted for ticket price inflation, that equates to an opening of $100.2 million for "Men in Black," $80.8 million for "Men in Black II" and $61.8 million for "MIB 3." If we look at final domestic totals when adjusted for ticket price inflation, "Men in Black" did $492.1 million ($250.7 million unadjusted), "Men in Black II" did $295.3 million ($190.4 million unadjusted) and "MIB 3" did $199.2 million ($179.0 million unadjusted). So for "Men in Black International" to open to $30.0 million, that hurts. As far as final totals go, even if "International" winds up with a similar multiplier as "MIB 3," it's looking at a final total of $96.1 million. Realistically, though, a final total in the $65-75 million range seems more likely, given the competition coming up and the muted reaction.

With a $110 million budget for "International," it could manage to sneak in a profit depending on how it does, uh... internationally, but this is not a win for Sony. They're just lucky they didn't spend quite as much as the respective studios for "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" or "Dark Phoenix" did. Now what went wrong here? Well, the first thing we have to look at here is how strong the fan base really is for Men in Black in 2019. Yes, the first movie is seen as a classic by many, but the second and third films, despite performing well at the box office, weren't exactly the most positively received movies. For any franchise, if you make two low quality sequels in a row after making a first film that people loved, they're not going to be quite as excited for your fourth movie, especially if there's 10 years between the second and third movie and seven years between the third and the fourth movie. The next problem here is the switch in cast. Sure, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are huge stars right now, but I'm willing to be the lack of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones turned off a lot of fans. Combine all of these factors together and throw the movie into an extremely crowded June, add in poor reviews and only so-so word of mouth, and you've got yourself a financial disaster.

If you're not a fan of my personal box office analysis there, well I'm sorry. I find it fun to talk about and with a movie as empty as this one, that's pretty much the only thing there is to talk about. Now when I said earlier that I don't think this movie is quite as bad as the 24 percent Rotten Tomatoes score seems to suggest, allow me to elaborate on that. With the way the black and white system for Rotten Tomatoes works, a 24 percent means that means that 76 percent of Rotten Tomatoes certified critics who reviewed this movie gave it a negative review. That doesn't mean all of them thought it was the worst movie of the year. In fact, all 76 percent of them could've said this movie is slightly below average and that would've given it an exact same score as a movie wherein 76 percent of critics said it was the worst movie ever made. So you have to learn to read between the lines there. Personally I haven't heard a whole ton of hate surrounding this movie. I've just heard a lot of people claiming that there's not much substance. In that case, I agree. This is a watchable film. Compared to "Dark Phoenix," it's practically a masterpiece. I just had a hard to connecting to it in very many ways, thus it ends up as a movie that's serviceable as background noise at best.

If I'm getting into specifics, this is the point of the review where I'm supposed to compare it directly to the first three films, explaining what those movies did right or wrong and applying it to this one. Truth be told, I've never seen the second or third movie. I have seen the first movie. In fact, I own it. It's a great movie. But it's been a while since I've actually thrown it in and watched it. Now I could've done my homework and re-watched the first movie while watching the second and third movie as well, but given that this was a spin-off with new characters, I didn't necessarily have a huge motivation to do so. Even though I do like and own the first movie, I don't have as strong of an emotional connection to this franchise as a whole compared to what some people do. So I decided that I would go into "International" without catching up on anything and see what happens. I loved Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson in "Thor: Ragnarok." At the very least I was hoping that they would carry the movie and make it a fun adventure with their already strong on-screen chemistry. We even had Liam Neeson in the movie as the MIB London director. With director F. Gary Gray ("The Fate of the Furious," "Straight Outta Compton"), this should've at least been competent.

While I'm confident in my deep dive into what went wrong for the movie financially, I'm at a complete loss as to why the quality of the film is so low. You have a good director. You have great lead stars all trying their best. You have a spin-off film that opens up a whole new section of this universe, giving you the creative freedom to do whatever it is that you want. Yet the final result is just nothing. That leads me to the screenplay, which was written by the duo of Matt Holloway and Art Marcum. Those two haven't done a whole lot, but they were partially responsible for the screenplay of "Iron Man." They also wrote "Transformers: The Last Knight," which is a significant stain on their record, but in their defense that was one of the more inoffensive Michael Bay Transformers movies. And Michael Bay was the big problem there, not the screenplay. So if I told you the writers of "Iron Man" teamed up with the director of "Straight Outta Compton" and "The Fate of the Furious" to make a Men in Black movie that starred Liam Neeson, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, that should be enough to get you excited, right? But I guess this is a situation where a lot of talent collaborated to make a lot of nothing. Sometimes that happens.

As one might expect from Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, both of them do a great job in this film. Chris Hemsworth is having a lot of fun as the more experienced agent. He was also given the freedom to be his usual, goofy self, which you saw showcased heavily in "Thor: Ragnarok." If you listen to off screen interviews with him, he's genuinely a hilarious guy, so I always love seeing him in movie roles where he's given the freedom to relax and be himself. That helped the movie. With Tessa Thompson, she does her absolute best at being the strong female character in the film. She had an experience when she was young where this is what she wanted. She ends up finding their secret organization. She ends up playing a key role in completing this mission. And it works. In a franchise titled MEN in Black, a woman coming in and being co-lead works in a very natural way. They don't try to force progressive themes down your throat. They even make fun of the fact that the name is outdated, but 22 years into the franchise you can't re-brand the name. Not without it feeling weird. They humorously play it off and the self-awareness of that was acceptable in my books. So yeah, overall these two lead characters are great on their own and work great as a team.

I guess the thing that fails here is the mission that they go on. These boring, silent aliens are up to no good. They're trying to track down this extremely dangerous weapon for their big alien organization called the Hive so that they can destroy the world. If that sounds generic, it's because it is. None of these aliens are interesting. The journey to stop them isn't fun and exciting. The threat posed doesn't make you feel like there's really any sense of danger. It just feels like when this screenplay was written, for some reason they decided to settle with the most basic alien plot they could come up with. Even though the director has done great movies, he wasn't able to take this screenplay and do anything interesting with it. I suppose they probably thought they were being somewhat clever when they added in the side plot of their being someone in MIB London that was a secret mole, but given how few characters in this organization that we were actually introduced to, you know exactly who it is the second that plot element is suggested. So yeah, this whole thing is just bland and lacking any energy at all, which is really baffling. Even though they tried, there's nothing Chris Hemsworth or Tessa Thompson could do to save this. My grade for "Men in Black International" is a 6/10.