2002 rewatch: Men in Black II wasted everyone's charms on a horny-dog sequel

Every week, Entertainment Weekly is looking back at the biggest movies of the summer of 2002. As audiences struggled to understand the new post-9/11 world order, Hollywood found itself in a moment of transition, with upcoming stars and soon-to-be-forever franchises playing alongside startling new visions and fading remnants of the old normal. Join us for a rewatch of the first true summer of Hollywood's strange new millennium. Last week: Adam Sandler's frostbitten foot. This week: Leah Greenblatt and Darren Franich check in on the galaxy's best-dressed defenders. Next week: Road to Perdition brings moody star-powered chiaroscuro to the summer blockbuster season.

LEAH: We've been to a lot of places so far in this summer series, Darren — the starts of two major franchises, some midnight-sun Christopher Nolan and a fatally sexy Frenchman, even the secrets of a Ya-Ya Sisterhood (still unsolved! At least to me). But we haven't been to sequel city, until now. Men in Black was a critical and commercial hit when it bowed in 1997, earning almost $600 million back on a $90 million budget; it was also, if you want to get granular on source material, a very early Marvel movie (a metric that the original 1998 Blade also technically falls under, though 2008's Iron Man officially birthed the MCU.)

Anyway, Men In Black II arrived five years after the first, bringing a lot more inborn familiarity with its aliens-among-us premise, and considerably less shine. EW's former film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote that the follow-up "achieves ultimate insignificance — it's the sci-fi comedy as Wiffle-ball epic. The otherworldly-spectacle jokes are still there, but not the goosey comic zest." Our own Dalton Ross's two-decade-old hot take: "Sure, the effects are neat to look at, but man, I hate that damn dog." That would be Frank the Pug, an extraterrestrial poured into the body of a small bat-faced canine who talks like a randy Teamster (actually, it was voice actor Tim Blaney). Frank is one of many four- or six- or 12-legged bits of flair that MIIB adds to the mix — a whole roster of mondo subway worms and tentacled beasts from other realms who fill the busy CGI foreground of the film.

At the start, Will Smith's Agent J has been shorn of his longtime partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), now neuralyzed to wipe his memory and living as a small-town postmaster in rural Massachusetts. But poor substitutes like the meat-cake Agent T (Patrick Warburton) are no match for the shenanigans of the newly arrived Serleena, a shape-shifting villain who comes in search of something called the Light of Zartha; she incarnates, for her own convenience, as Lara Flynn Boyle in red lipstick and lingerie. And so K must be de-neuralyzed and brought back on the job, and soon enough he's back in the suit side-eyeing J — who's too crushed out on a pretty bystander named Laura (Rosario Dawson) to mind-erase her, even after she's witnessed Serleena's splattery erasure of her pizza-parlor boss.

The introduction of a love interest feels a little inevitable, even though, like all agents, J is forbidden both an official identity and a personal life. And Rosario's Laura is so fresh and pretty you almost want to follow her wherever she goes once she gets squirreled away for safe-keeping. (Alas, her lockdown mostly involves playing Twister with the worm guys.) But it's also a drag on a plot that's already not going anywhere quickly. Darren what's your take on round two — did it speak to you? And when it did, did you want to smack on the nose with a newspaper? Or do I just hate talking pugs as much as Dalton does.

DARREN: Well. Men in Black II is one of the worst movies ever, but that should not obscure the fact that it's also one of the most boring movies ever. The first film took a solid concept (buddy cops plus aliens) and shot it to the moon, mixing zesty retro-Roswell production design with impressive (and Oscar-winning!) makeup. Jones played a brick wall for Smith to bounce off. Problem number thousand with this shoddy sequel is it takes half the movie for their duo to recover that dynamic. I think there was some notion of upending the formula, with Smith now a jaded expert and Jones a memory-wiped neophyte. The student becomes the teacher and vice versa — fine, except Smith still comes off like a brash rookie, and Jones is somehow stern in mailman shorts.

Men in Black 1 also benefited from an Ed Solomon script that fit a lot of quirky flourishes into a straightforward procedural story. But success can ruin eccentricity. Memorable moments replay here with a This worked last time shrug. Tony Shalhoub's Jeebs gets his head shot off twice. The throwaway notion that some celebrities are aliens recurs here with a (whoopsie!) Michael Jackson cameo. Unabashed horniness became a dominant cultural mood in the five years since 1997, so now those worm guys are swinging hedonists ("Don't fall asleep!" J warns Laura when he drops her off at their apartment, ho ho ho.) And Frank the Pug is now Frank the Pug Who Gets Some, forever chasing (pardon my scientifically accurate canine language) bitches' butts while singing "I Will Survive" or cranking up, God help us, "Who Let the Dogs Out." And then, at the end of the movie, we finally get what all moviegoers badly wanted in the year 2002: Rip Torn talking about the Kama Sutra.

What the hell happened? You could go macro, Leah, and blame an unfortunate period of special effects technology. MIIB fully embraced CGI at the worst possible moment, creating a lot of limp action set pieces that already looked bad in the Minority Report summer. Effects legend Rick Baker returned as the makeup artist, but I don't think there's a truly memorable creature in this whole feature — except maybe the Ballchinian, who's so memorable, I need a neuralyzer. Lara Flynn Boyle's Sereena is a vampy bore, except when she unfurls plant tentacles that are as cinematic as a modem. There's a palpable desperation in the needle drops and the topical reaches: eBay, a flying car steered by a PlayStation controller, the presence of two Johnny Knoxville heads, and did I mention the Baha Men?

I talked a bit last week about Adam Sandler's retrenchment to safe territory in Mr. Deeds. You can sense a similar move by Smith here, after the mega-flop of Wild Wild West and the disappointments of The Legend of Bagger Vance and Ali. (His next film after this was another sequel, Bad Boys II). He has a couple solid lines here, Leah, but he's already losing the spark of his initial blockbuster run. J comes off self-consciously wacky, betraying the legitimate irreverence of his original Men in Black star turn. David Cross as a man-child video store clerk, a totally ridiculous climactic secret-parent reveal, the shameless plugging of a freaking Sprint store in MIB headquarters: I do not like it, Leah, not one bit of it. Am I being too harsh? How do you think this very '90s sequel fits into the summer of 2002?

LEAH: I would take an entire calendar of Tommy Lee Jones in civil-servant workwear, thank you; I get the feeling that man could give Disappointed Gravitas even in Ranger Bob hot pants. But I agree with you that Smith's renegade shtick curdled on this round, aside from one killer line that I'm still sort of amazed made the cut: When an agency car pulls up to escort them back to headquarters and the sunglassed chauffeur conveniently disappears himself into the steering wheel, K asks, "Does that come standard?" and J shrugs, "Actually it came with a black dude, but he kept getting pulled over."

It's a rare moment in MIIB where the real world actually breaks through the silliness and flop sweat of the script. Apparently there was a lot of pushback on all the rewrites happening behind the scenes, with Barry Fanaro — who also penned I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, because it all comes back to Sandler — punching up Robert Gordon's original screenplay with a flurry of pop-culture references, and director Barry Sonnenfeld objecting to the prominence of the romance plot. And thus we get Baha Men and Martha Stewart and (maybe) true love's kiss, but not a narrative through-line that makes much sense.

There were moments when the movie's chaotic grab-bag of winks and cameos weirdly reminded me of a more recent movie, Don't Look Up; is that crazy? Both have a sense of Tim Burton-esque camp and cultural satire but somehow blunt it, or just don't take it far enough (though Danny Elfman does return to do the soundtrack, and the title-credits font is still extremely Burton-y). Ballchinians aside, I think I hated it all less than you; it sort of went by in a "Meh, sure" haze for me. But I do wish that Smith's natural charisma and sharper edges hadn't seemed so hemmed in by the bland safety of the script, and that Cross's and Knoxville's characters were less noxious man-baby clichés — though I would still fight to the death to keep that Biz Markie beatboxing scene in. (It's kind of comforting to think Biz never died, right? He just went back to his home planet.)

Obviously, both the movie's leads have Oscars now — Jones for The Fugitive, which he took home in 1994, and Smith earlier this year for King Richard — as well many nominations between them. Given how Smith's 2022 ceremony went, we're not sure when and how we'll be seeing him on screen again. But it's always interesting to me when that grade of talent ends up in goofy popcorn like this. There's one more moment at the very end, when, spoiler, Dawson's Laura is about to ascend to the sky to fulfill her space-princess destiny (she is the Light!) and Jones explains to her that it's not that she gets sad when it rains, but that "It rains because you're sad, baby." It's a line so corny it shouldn't even work in a country song, but he imbues it with such feeling that you actually believe in those few seconds that he might be her dad, per the script's convoluted reasoning. That's acting, baby.

Otherwise you're totally right — without the carbon-dating of Nick Cannon as a junior agent with like, two lines, MIIB could have just as easily come from the '90s. It was also a New York movie, though, and there was reportedly a lot of Twin Towers footage that had to be removed or reworked in post. Sonnenfeld would wait 10 more years to make a third sequel, and nearly another decade after that to pass the "spin-off" Men In Black International, with Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, to director F. Gary Gray (Straight Outta Compton, The Fate of the Furious). Darren, what's your take — should they have stopped it all at Vincent D'Onofrio? (Still sheer perfection in a skin suit to me.)

DARREN: Well. Some franchises are not really franchises, and decades of corporate delusion that they are franchises produces nothing more than big-money crud and real wastes of Emma Thompson's time. The first Men in Black was a perfect, enclosed story, with J ascending to agent status while K departed to live as a happy civilian suffering decades of memory loss. I'll see your D'Onofrio and raise you one Linda Fiorentino, whose whole goddess-of-snarkily-indifferent-darkness persona gave a very bubbly movie genuine gothic chill.

She cut the movie down to size. That sensibility gets lost in all the sequels. I'll never forgive International for casting very cool Tessa Thompson as, like, the MIB version of Lost's Hurley, an awed in-universe megafan. The central fun of the original movie is how not in awe everyone is. It's the anti-Steven Spielberg adventure — just another day at the world-saving office — despite Spielberg's presence as a producer. In Men in Black II, even the fun bits feel torn between digital excess and broseph nastiness. Dawson, already an incipient streets-of-New-York legend after Kids, has to play wide-eyed romance while being driven various important places. There's one great sight gag with a whole alien civilization living in a locker at Grand Central Station. Of course, the fuzzy little guys go to a fuzzy little strip club.

One note: K's journey turns into a self-investigation. As a younger MIB agent, he self-neuralyzed — and left himself a trail of clues. The Search for Lost Memory was officially the blockbuster trend of 2002, after The Bourne Identity (another amnesia tale) and Minority Report (where one memory becomes a heist-requiring Macguffin). Was something in the air — or did everyone just really love Memento? Ironically, MIIB would be better if its teased-out revelations were first-act plot foundation. Imagine Dawson not as a cheerful newcomer but a highly effective space messiah, paired up with the father who abandoned her and dad's handsome, funny, somewhat-age-appropriate young partner. The sparks could fly! Instead, we get a randy dog, and so many tendrils.

In conclusion, it's a crime against history that "Black Suits Comin' (Nod Ya Head)" is Smith's last self-performed movie theme. Points for rhyming "dangerous" with "strangerous," but the goofy chorus seems to be attempting to create a dance craze out of… nodding your head? If I were Johnny Knoxville, I'd be shaking both my heads.

Read past 2002 rewatches:

• Mr. Deeds launched Adam Sandler's biggest decade, for better or worse
• Lilo & Stitch still packs an emotional punch
• The influence and disappointments of Minority Report
• How The Bourne Identity reinvented action for a new millennium
• The Sum of All Fears was somehow too late and too early
• Insomnia was a flawed but promising daylight noir from pre-Batman Christopher Nolan
• Star Wars: Episode 2—Attack of the Clones is still fascinating and confusing
• Unfaithful brought sex to the summer
• Spider-Man still swings high one multiverse later