Directed by: F. Gary Gray
Starring: Tessa Thompson, Chris Hemsworth, Liam Neeson, Kumail Nanjiani
Rated PG-13, 114 minutes
The “Men in Black” movies have always been about spectacular things hiding in plain sight. Across four installments, the titular suit-clad secret agents have regularly gone to great lengths to keep humankind blissfully unaware of the existence of aliens, and even greater lengths to appear calm and casual about it. “Men in Black: International,” a reboot of the series featuring an almost entirely new cast and a new director, takes this ethos to heart, but maybe too much so. “International” doesn’t sneak around, it just blends in with the background.
This is a little surprising, considering some of the talent working on the movie. In the leading role, for starters, is the enormously talented Tessa Thompson (“Sorry to Bother You”), in the midst of a much-deserved surge in her career. Here, Thompson plays an alien-obsessed wannabe Men in Black agent, who becomes the first civilian to ever track down the secretive organization. Once she has found her way into a job at MIB, the newly-codenamed Agent M is sent off to the London office to begin her first mission, teaming up with the illustrious and cocky Agent H (Chris Hemsworth, “Avengers: Endgame”) to investigate some extraterrestrial goings-on in Europe.
The plot takes a number of twists and turns from there, and while the script may not boast much in the way of novelty—the “Men in Black” series, as always, remains more concerned with its style and one-liners than with its storytelling—it hits its beats, it offers a satisfying conclusion, and it doesn’t leave any plot holes out in the open. Emulating its predecessors without trying to outshine them, “International” is a quintessential throwaway movie, intended to kill some time on a summer afternoon. And to that end, it succeeds.
Where “International” stumbles is largely in its technique. Director F. Gary Gray (“The Italian Job”) seems to have no idea how human interactions work, leaving Thompson and Hemsworth foundering in scene after scene of nonexistent chemistry and awkward pacing. The pacing issues are especially noticeable whenever the jokes come out. All comedy depends on timing, of course, on the release of a punchline at exactly the moment when its impact will be greatest, but almost every joke in “International” is miscued. In one scene, which might be the worst scene in any movie so far this year, a character points out that a line spoken in passing was funny (because how else would we know that a line is funny, without being told?), after which all present characters fall into a wretched imitation of laughter for several uncomfortable seconds. Either Gray doesn’t understand how jokes work, or he believes his audience doesn’t.
The problem with poor directing is that it makes everybody look bad. So even Tessa Thompson, who put together one of the most vibrant, honest, and scene-stealing performances of 2018 in “Sorry to Bother You,” looks like an amateur here, stumbling around like a marionette controlled by unsure hands. Hemsworth fares slightly better, but mostly because the script demands only that he make pouty faces and speak with a British accent, skills that his career thus far has already put to the test. In a few key scenes, though, Agent H has difficult talks with his mentor and father figure, Agent High T (Liam Neeson, “Taken”), but there is no emotional honesty to be wrought from these moments; the script never goes deeper than “You were like a father to me” in expressing the complicated history these characters share.
If we want to get conspiratorial about “Men in Black: International,” we could look at it as an incisive criticism of Hollywood’s present state of affairs: a boring reboot that nobody asked for, which cost far too much to make and isn’t bringing in enough money at the box office, whose hollowness and mediocrity are intended as a protest against the franchising frenzy that has taken over the movie industry in the last decade. Of course, that gives “International” far too much credit, but, just like young Agent M dreaming about intelligent life out in the universe, it’s nice to imagine that artless and forgettable projects like this one are actually part of something larger, something with meaning and significance, something that aspires to be more than cinematic wallpaper.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 6/28/19.