Review: Men in Black (1997)

Rewatching the opening of Barry Sonnefeld’s Men in Black, I was transported back to the movie theatre in 1997 where I was watching the film with my grandmother. I was wowed by the opening as a six-year-old boy. I’d still say that this opening has it all, truly, from Danny Elfman’s score, with its variations on lilting fantasy and a pulsing 1990s drum beat, to the concluding “Splat!” of the bug on the windshield. What an opening credit sequence and what a time for mainstream movie making, when sitting down to a film that was produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Will Smith guaranteed that you were in for some entertainment. In 1997, the fact that mainstream genre entertainment had such wit and charm and carefree competence—characteristics perhaps best described as Spielbergian—was considered commonplace. Nowadays, sadly, it’s almost miraculous. 

Men in Black, based on a little-read Marvel comic from the early 1990s and taking its name from the moniker for shadowy government agents, plays in broad strokes. The movie follows a grizzled older agent, Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent K, and a young recruit, Will Smith’s Agent J, tracking down a dangerous alien posing as a bumpkin farmer in New York City. Equal parts buddy comedy, science fiction, and action thriller, it’s the kind of movie where the subtext is text, the themes are explicit, and the characters talk out their motivations. But it doesn’t make a fuss about any of these elements. It understands that you only need a few key scenes to explain character motivation. It’s breezy and fun, easy enough for a six-year-old to follow and enjoy it (as I did) as well as a 72-year-old (as my grandmother was at the time).

It’s a movie where all the character development, simple plotting, visual storytelling, and broad humour are in service to entertainment with a capital “E,” which comes quick and clear, without much complication or anything to get in the way of the fun. The whole film is 97 minutes, front to back, and that includes the jokes and action scenes and chases, including the famous opening one where Will Smith runs down an alien who just won’t stop running. It’s crazy, you think. They could fit all that in a movie that short? What reason do modern blockbusters have to be so long? What reason, indeed.

Soon enough in Men in Black, in the kind of scene that demonstrates what I meant about broad strokes, we meet an illegal alien extraterrestrial posing as an illegal alien human as well as a blustering white cop with teeth half too white. These are broad characterizations that belong in a comic book and a movie based on a comic book, but not really real life. That’s a feature, not a bug here, because we can follow every beat and get the subtext and understand the snappy little political commentary that doesn’t distract from the fact that there’s an alien on screen.

Then we meet Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent K and we are reminded that once-upon-a-time there was a leading man in Hollywood whose charisma was born entirely from his dead serious demeanour. The dude was cool and funny and never, ever winked or smirked or let you in on the joke (Batman Forever being the exception that proves the rule). Barry Sonnenfeld, at perhaps the height of his directorial achievements, understands the appeal of Jones, which is why he pushes the camera in on him as Jones snaps back at the cop, “Don’t sir me, young man. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.” Jones’ performance as K also demonstrates the film’s multi-generational appeal; K is for the moms and dads, J for the kids, so the whole family can enjoy the film. Jones commands the screen throughout Men in Black. Will Smith might be the breakout star of the film, but Jones is the leading role (and billed first, no less).

There are many gags throughout Men in Black, none better than Vincent D’Onofrio as the alien bug dressed in the skinsuit of a bad man returning into his farm house and demanding “Sugar… Water…” from his flabbergasted wife (Siobhan Fallon Hogan). She obeys, he slurps down the disgusting slurry while she watches in horror, and proceeds to rearrange his skinsuit to cause the wife to faint. It’s grotesque and absurd and the kind of joke you never forget once you’ve seen it. Men in Black isn’t the kind of film that impresses you in terms of flash or appeal or brilliantly crafted action scenes or individual shots. But every moment seems well-calibrated, and this is one of the best of them.

There’s also some genius special effects in the film. The CGI has dated over the years, but it’s always applied in conjunction with gooey effects and clever models and some nice miniature work. The best of the bunch is when J examines a dead body in the morgue only for the head to split open and reveal a tiny dying “grey” operating the body from a little cockpit inside the body. The gasping breaths of the alien on his last legs, his bulbous eyes, his desperate appeal for help, it’s all absurd, but tactile, and thus credible. It just works.

A big part of the film’s success is also Danny Elfman’s exceptional score, which builds on his work in Beetlejuice and predicts his work on Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. The connection to 2002’s Spider-Man is fitting, not only because both are Elfman scores, but because Raimi’s film marked the beginning of the end of an era of broad toned yet affectionate blockbusters with charismatic characters and big-budget razzle dazzle. Breaking free of categorization restricted to decades, we could instead say that this era arguably began in the early 1980s with movies like Ghostbusters, Gremlins, and other Spielberg-produced fare and ended with Spider-Man 2. Men in Black, like Ghostbusters and Gremlins, is the sort of movie that you absolutely love as a kid and still find endlessly fun as an adult. Is it great? Not exactly. But it’s great entertainment and the sort of cinema that does not, and perhaps cannot, exist anymore. Our world is too fragmented and our cinema too convoluted to allow for movies as simply, competently fun as Men in Black.

8 out of 10

Men in Black (1997, USA)

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld; written by Ed Solomon, based on The Men in Black by Lowell Cunningham; starring Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Linda Fiorentino, Vincent D’Onofrio, Rip Torn, Tony Shalhoub, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Mike Nussbaum.

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