For the fourth week in a row, Hollywood's big summertime releases continue to disappoint with the fourth installment in the "Men in Black" series.
Starring "Thor: Ragnarok" actors Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth, "Men in Black: International" moves the action from New York to Europe. Thompson plays Molly, a young woman who discovered the MIB when she was a little kid and has spent her entire life trying to find and join the agency.
After she sneaks into MIB headquarters, Agent O, played once again by Emma Thompson, gives Molly a probationary trial run and renames her Agent M, who is then sent to the London branch of MIB where she is supposed to basically be an intern in the office.
Agent M manages to charm Agent H, Hemsworth, into letting her join him on a mission to protect a really important alien. Things go bad, the alien gets killed and the MIB becomes convinced that H and O are traitors.
The duo now has to stay one step ahead of the MIB while figuring out who the murderers are and stop them from destroying the world.
I didn't hate this movie, but I didn't really like it either. If you have seen "Ragnarok," then it will be no surprise that Thompson and Hemsworth work well together. The likability of the two leads is the only thing this movie really has going for it.
The bad guys are aliens who reminded me very much of last week's disappointment, "Dark Phoenix," which also had bad guys who can take the form of humans.
In "Dark Phoenix," we see a human played by Jessica Chastain who acts like a human until the bad guy takes her form, then Chastain plays an emotionless, very boring bad guy for the rest of the movie.
In "MIB," we see a janitor, who acts like a human, who is killed by an alien who takes his form then spends the rest of the movie as an emotionless, very boring bad guy. The only difference between this movie's bad guy and last week's bad guy is that this bad guy splits into two identical, emotionless, boring bad guys, played by identical twins Laurent and Larry Bourgeois.
Every time the twins appeared on screen, I kept thinking about how great Vincent D'Onofrio was in the original movie as Edgar.
Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones do not appear in this movie. The only returning actor who does more than a cameo is Thompson, and her role is still very short. This movie could have used Agents J and K. None of the new characters are memorable like those two were.
Boring characters and a forgettable plot don't help the movie, but the movie gets even worse the longer it goes on. It is terribly written and none of the jokes land, but I was still kind of OK with it until the last 20 minutes. While M and H are fighting a three-armed arms dealer, a coincidence occurs that killed the movie for me. It is the kind of movie killing coincidence that screams that the writers ran out of idea. From here, I was just waiting for the movie to end.
This is easily the worst movie in the MIB series.
The last month has not been a good one for the box office. After "Aladdin," "Godzilla: King of the Monsters," "Dark Phoenix" and now "MIB," I am hoping "Toy Story 4" can turn things around next week.
Entertainment on 06/15/2019