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MEN IN BLACK II Send This Review to a Friend
The sequel to "Men in Black" is all about special effects and sight gags and it delivers what it is supposed to for its core audience. There is one weird visual bit after another as Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones go through their paces playing agents charged with controlling enemy aliens in our midst and beating back the inevitable plot to best them and overrun earth. It may all get a bit much after a while for those not caught up in the outrageousness. But much of the stuff is really funny.
The film jumps off to a rousing, inventive and hilarious start as a gigantic snake-like monster with an enormous mouth races along subway tracks and chomps on a car, which limps into the New York station at Central Park West and 81st Street half chewed away, its passengers acting as if nothing had happened.
Pretty and sexy looking Lara Flynn Boyle is another plus as the villainous Serleena, whose fingers become endless snakelike tentacles that can grossly pass through ears and noses and wrap around anyone or anything in sight. Then there's her versatile tongue, which can turn an ear kiss into an expedition. Add the talking dog that keeps making rude and crude comments. This still is only a smattering of what's in store, with an army of weird alien creatures and a beautiful young woman (played by Rosario Dawson), who doesn't know who she really is.
It almost goes without saying that the real stars of the film augmenting the lively direction of Barry Sonnenfeld are all those responsible for the special effects, the production design, the photography, the make-up, the editing--in short, the comic, visual action onslaught that gives the film its reason for being. Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro wrote the screenplay, based on Gordon's story from Malibu Comic by Lowell Cunningham. It is a screenplay that stretches the story almost to the snapping point in trying to do justice to the original. But that doesn't matter much.
Those who dig the whole "Men in Black" idea will find plenty of amusement in the none-too-long 82-minute stretching. A Columbia Pictures release reviewed at the Loew's 84th Street Theatre.
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