▷ Men in black international critica | Actualizado diciembre 2023

Premonition

The fourth installment of this franchise, Men in Black International, arrives in our theaters this Friday, June 14. In it, Chris Hemsworth (Avengers Endgame, Ghostbusters 2016) and Thessa Thompson (Thor: Ragnarok) take over from Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as the protagonists of a story that also transcends U.S. borders to jump across the pond, to Europe and Africa.

The new Men in Black film tells the story of how the recently recruited probationary agent M (Thompson) is assigned to the London branch by the organization’s leader, Agent O (Emma Thompson). There, M will report to the headquarters superior known as Hight T (Liam Neeson) and meet the European headquarters’ star agent, Agent H (Hemsworth).

First of all, before continuing with the critique, let’s make one thing clear: the viewers who are guardians of the essences better take a deep breath and don’t start filling their mouths with the already worn out expressions of “this is a betrayal to the spirit of …”, “this is not the Men in Black” and so on.

Love and monsters

It took me a while to see Men In Black: International, the MIB spin-off, having to wait until it was available in home format. Having commented on the previous installments in this blog (Men In Black, Men In Black II, and Men In Black 3), I had intended to see this one and, incidentally, address it here. But was such an installment really necessary? I’ll clear up any doubts right now, after a brief synopsis.

Visually it looks great, it has improved a lot since MIB III. This is especially noticeable in the look of the aliens, the weapons, the action scenes… Its sound is as good as the previous ones. It has great themes, but yes, do not expect any interpreted by Will Smith as in the original trilogy. Maybe it’s even an improvement.

The cast is great, in fact I dare to say that I like it better than the previous ones. I highlight above all the main quartet, or at least the four who carry the weight of the plot, Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Liam Neeson, and Rafe Spall. The director this time F. Gary Gray, who has proven himself capable of handling an installment of this particular organization flawlessly.

Premonition film

A good example of this is the alien who plays the role of a comic sidekick. He has too much presence and there are moments in which you don’t understand why he is given so much attention, but in exchange there are other situations in which he offers amusing rejoinders that liven up the whole thing. What is not clear to me is that those responsible really know what they are instead of just throwing a lot of them in hoping that one of them will work.

Beyond that, the first thing worth noting is that the protagonist of the role is Tessa Thompson -just as Smith was in the first one despite there being a more or less clear balance with Jones- in a character that from the start recovers a freshness similar to that of the first installment with her attempts to gain access to an organization that marked her life during an isolated event in her childhood.

In a way, it works as a new entry point for the new generations and Thompson proves to have the necessary self-confidence. He’s no Will Smith, but he doesn’t pretend to fill the gap either, as the roles are reversed here and the craziest character is the veteran agent played by an accurate Chris Hemsworth.

I am all of them

There are movie sagas that have found their peak in the fifth installment, and others that by the third had already squeezed all possible juice. That’s what happened with ‘Men in Black’, whose third film, released in 2012, already showed signs of exhaustion.

Introduced the new characters and superfluous conflicts, the film becomes something like an infantilization of the previous films, which possessed a more cynical and corrosive sense of humor than this fourth installment. Hemsworth continues to play the fool more than anything else, laughing too much at himself, while the new addition (Tessa Thompson) puts some sanity into the comic-fantastic wanderings. The characters move around as in an Agent 007 film, again, and there are skirmishes – insufficient to keep the story interesting – in Paris (where we are told that Gustave Eiffel himself was one of the first Men in Black), London, Naples, the African desert and the labyrinthine alleys of Marrakech.