My Review of "Men in Black II"

Men in Black II came out back in 2002. It's a full five years after the original movie. I wouldn't expect the special effects and movie to be as bad as this. If you've seen my review of the first movie you can see that I actually loved it. That's why I was shocked that I never saw any of the sequels. Now it's time to remedy this and boy was I in for a surprise.

This movie starts off probably 5 years after the events of the first movie. Jay is now a senior agent at the agency but we're quickly noticing he's a lone wolf. He doesn't work well with others and he's gotten rid of many partners in the past including his potential partner from the first movie. I guess that's to create a new love interest in this movie.

So of course we have to have a new earth threatening problem to have Jay on another mission. This time it's this character known as Serleena. She's an intergalactic alien looking for some sort of light found on Earth. She'll do anything to get her hands on it.

Fortunately the only person who can attain this light is the agent that had dealt with it so many decades ago and that's Kay. As you remember from the first movie Kay is now retired. This means Jay has to get Kay, get his memories back and find the light before the world is blown up or something.

It's a pretty simple premise and it does have potential. There's a lot of things that they did right but there's even more things that they did wrong with this movie.

Still intact is the unfair concept of duty. Jay and Kay are still lonely men that feel a sense of duty. In this movie Kay comes to realize that sometimes we're destined to be who we are and in this movie he's a top notch agent. His character still shines in this movie but they dialed it back a bit for Jay's character.

At least in the first movie Jay was a smart and cunning agent. This movie sort of updated his character into some sort of Homer Simpson. He's a lot dumber and simple. I wished they didn't do that with this character because his original concept was really cool. Now he's kind of a comic relief character that constantly gets into dumb situations.

As a whole the movie has become a lot dumber in general. They have a whole slew of dumber characters and idiotic situations. You can tell that they're trying to appease a younger audience. Though they try to pander to older audiences by placing odd cameos throughout the movie. There's some surprising stars that are added to this movie that really have no impact to the movie other than for audience members to point at the screen.

We have some of the same great practical effects from the original movie but they relied heavily on CGI effects. These type of effects from 2002 do not translate well 20 years later. In fact they look utterly atrocious today. The original movie that came out 5 years prior to this movie looks lightyears ahead of this one. I know it's weird because you'd want to have something bigger and better.

You can tell they anticipated for this movie to make it big too because there's a ton of product placement in this movie. There are so many odd and awkward product placements in this movie and it's really off putting while watching it.

They packed a lot of unnecessary content into this movie and I suspect it was the fault of studio executives trying to line their pockets with money. It's really unfortunate because it really messes up the flow and pacing of the whole movie.

Overall, I didn't have a great time watching this movie. A ton of the heart and soul that went into the first movie aren't in this one. It really feels like a corporate money grab more than anything else. I'm sure others may feel differently but I unfortunately have to give this movie a 4.5 out of 10. It's really too bad because they did have a good concept that could have worked. If only the execution was done better.