July 2, 1997 | There is a marvelous blend of kicky exuberance and deadpan drollery throughout Men in Black, a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi action-adventure that leaves Batman and Robin far behind, choking on its dust, in the race for the title of Best Live Action Cartoon of Summer ’97. Based on the cult-favorite comic-book series by Lowell Cunningham, and directed at an appropriately pell-mell pace by Barry Sonnenfeld (Get Shorty, The Addams Family), this spirited extravaganza is a sleek and cheeky treat that could well prove habit-forming for audiences of all ages.
Call it Dragnet Meets Ghostbusters, and you won’t be far off the mark. The movie imagines a super-secret government agency known as Men in Black — MiB for short — with a mandate to oversee very illegal aliens. Not undocumented workers, mind you, but extra-terrestrials.
In keep with the agency’s name, the dress code for MiB agents is starkly simple: crisp white shirts, black suits and ties, way-cool Ray Bans. The latter, however, are not mere fashion accessories. Rather, the shades protect an agent when he wields the MiB equivalent of a magic wand — a quick-flash, pocket-size memory eraser that causes innocent bystanders to forget anything they see or hear of MiB activities. When you think about it, that really is the very best way for a super-secret government agency to maintain its super-secrecy.
In the world according to Men in Black, alien “immigrants” have prospered on Earth for many years. Most of the time, they are well-behaved and law-abiding in their human guises. Better still, they frequently supply their human hosts with high-tech innovations. (According to one MiB agent, we have extra-terrestrials to thank for Velcro, microwave ovens and — no kidding — liposuction.) Sometimes, though, an alien might, well, misbehave. Or, in a worst-case scenario, pose a serious threat to humankind. That’s when the Men in Black step in. They monitor all extra-terrestrial activity, and, when the need arises, deport malefactors. It’s a dirty job, but, hey, somebody’s got to do it.
Tommy Lee Jones is perfectly cast as Agent K, a tightly-wound, aggressively competent MiB operative who seems fully capable of staring down any extra-terrestrial during a close encounter. Occasionally, Jones gets to bark a sardonic quip or two. But he is at his funniest when he is being dead-serious, giving commands and providing information in rat-tat-tat bursts of warp-speed monotone. (Try to imagine Jack Webb cast in a screwball comedy — say, Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday — and you’ll get the idea.) Agent K isn’t exactly blasé about his work, but he does give the impression of someone who has seen too many fantastical things to ever again be impressed or intimidated. When he tells an unwelcome extra-terrestrial to “put up your hands — and your flippers,” he sounds like a guy who’s doing just another day’s work. And that’s precisely what makes Jones’ sobersided performance, in this deliriously bizarre context, so deliciously hilarious.
As Agent J, a newcomer under Agent K’s tutelage, Will Smith provides the proper counter-balance of gee-whiz enthusiasm for Jones’ seen-it-all insouciance. For Agent J, tangling with tentacled extra-terrestrials is not yet something to be taken lightly. Much as he did in Independence Day, Smith gracefully walks a fine line between hip sassiness and bug-eyed astonishment, playing Agent J as a gung-ho, street-smart dude who often finds it difficult — but not entirely impossible — to maintain his cool while earning his stripes as a MiB operative.
Ed Solomon wrote the screenplay, reportedly with uncredited assistance from, among others, David Koepp (Jurassic Park, The Shadow). Solomon also wrote the Bill and Ted movies — both Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey — so he’s probably the one responsible for this movie’s tone of hip nonchalance in the face of extraordinary manifestations. But don’t worry: Neither Agent J nor Agent K tells anyone to “Party on, dude!”
Borrowing a page or two from the original Ghostbusters, Solomon, along with whoever else had a hand in the writing, wisely refrains from turning everything into a joke. To be sure, the actual threat to humankind here, posed by a monstrously huge insect-like creature who crams itself into an earthling’s skin, is fairly ridiculous. Well, maybe no more ridiculous than the bogeymen in some episodes of X-Files, but ridiculous just the same. Even so, just as all the joking and free-wheeling riffs in Ghostbusters were offset by a fantastic but relatively serious conflict with supernatural powers, there is an adequately involving melodramatic plot beneath the controlled chaos and inspired satire of Men in Black. That works very much to the movie’s benefit, since, as anyone who has seen Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery can tell you, an excess of spoofery can wind up curdling the stomach instead of tickling the funny bone.
The performances are everything they should be. Linda Fiorentino gets into the spirit of things with a deftly timed performance as a medical examiner who finds strange things, and even stranger creatures, inside what appear to be human corpses. Rip Torn offers another smoothly imperturbable comic turn as Agent Zed, the Big Boss Man of Men in Black. And Vincent D’Onofrio gives a performance of remarkably expressive physicality as Edgar, a farmer whose flesh is commandeered by the chief villain of the piece. D’Onofrio’s clenched, jerky movements vividly convey the discomfort of a bad guy who quite literally doesn’t fit the role he has chosen to play.
Playing off each other’s strengths, Jones and Smith develop subtle comic rhythms and an amusing edgy give-and-take. Smith has the flashier moves and the funnier wisecracks, and he makes the most of them. But Jones is the one who usually has the final word, and he says it more often than not in a self-assured, no-nonsense growl that juices the joke with a jolt of straight-faced lunacy. When Agent J wants to mock his partner’s taste in music, he reminds Agent K that, “Elvis is dead!” Unfazed, Agent J responds: “Elvis isn’t dead. He just went home.” Which, presumably, is the sort of information only Men in Black are privy to.
