Normally, I’m easy to entertain but this movie was very disappointing. Where to begin? For one thing, I got the impression that the script was being worked on in the daytime while the scenes were shot at night. There was practically no backstory on Lara Flynn Boyle’s character as Serleena, as there was on Vincent D’onofrio in the original movie. Tommy Lee Jones looked vaguely irritated in his scenes and he wasn’t in too much of the movie at that. I felt that Will Smith did as much as he could with the material, but he didn’t have much to work with. The only funny scene I saw was a cameo with Michael Jackson as a MIB wannabe. I felt this movie was thrown together at the last minute and I want my 88 minutes and $6.50 back.
I haven’t seen it yet (I do plan on it, though), but I don’t hold too high hopes for it being as good as the original. This sequel was based on the Saturday morning cartoon series, of all things. Couldn’t they afford a good set of writers to give them something new?
Both movies were lightweight fluff intended to pleasantly waste a summer evening, albeit with a huge special effects budget. I think both succeeded on their own terms…Timmy
I have to agree with medstar.
I enjoyed MIB II, but it was not nearly as good as the original. They went out of their way to take minor characters from the first movie and give them more to do, but without increasing their comedy quotient.
Example: In the first movie, as they pull up to a character (who looks surprisingly like Riff-Raff from the RHPS) and his dog to try to get some information, the audience assumes it’s that wierd looking guy who is the alien. But, no! It’s the little bull dog next to him who is in fact the alien, and who gives them some info. OK, a pretty funny scene, that lasts all of two minutes!
In MIB II, that bull dog has become a major character, who is there the entire movie. He contributes to a couple of good jokes (one where he wears the same MIB suit was kinda funny, and for some unexplainable reason the dog singing that “So Now I’m Back” song while they were driving around just cracked me up), but aside from a chuckle here and there, they just did not have him add much to the comedy or the plot.
I also missed the biggest joke from the first movie (that they used again and again and again, but was still funny every time): that all the strange or wierd celebrities are actually aliens, thus explaining the success of Carrot-Top or of Sylvester Stallone (pardon me if they didn’t use those particular celebrities, it doesn’t hurt the joke one little bit if they didn’t). They did not use this joke at all this time, except for the one Michael Jackson cameo, and even then I’m not sure he was portrayed as an alien (that was still funny, though).
I also agree with Tim R. Mortiss that “both movies were lightweight fluff intended to pleasantly waste a summer evening,” but the lightweight fluff last year was much better and much funnier than the lightweight fluff this year.
That would be “I Will Survive”.
Yes, it is. Thank you.
I don’t know what it is about this song, but it was funny when the dog sang it, and it was funny when the football players sang it in The Replacements.
And another thing: the movie is very short. I think I read it is only an hour and 28 minutes! Although I enjoyed watching it, I’m not altogether sure i got my money’s worth.
Well, if you look in the backgournd they had Martha Steward in the tube 
bet she is wishing now she were an alien so she could get off this rock.
WHat did you all thing of the Cartoon before the movie?
I want a pet Chub Chub
I did not think of it as a bad movie. I think it met but did not exceed my expectations. It was a nice way to spend the evening with an attractive lady.
Jesus Christ! Where in the hell do you live where you can see a movie for 6.50? About 15 years ago I remember grousing about 7 dollar movie prices.
I haven’t seen a sub-9.00 movie in YEARS.
Men in Black II is obviously crap, but 6.50? This is the real mystery. There is a second-run theater where you can get in for 3 bucks. but six fifty for first run? I don’t get it.
I pay $5.50 for matinee (shows before 5:30 pm or so) in the Portland, Oregon area.
I saw MiB2 on Wednesday. I was really hoping it would be much better than the first one. (I started another thread a couple of weeks ago in which I expressed some ambivalence about the first film. I liked it enough to get the DVD, but it just seemed as if it was missing “something”.) Unfortunately I don’t think it’s as good.
First of all, I was put off by Will Smith’s portrayal of Agent J at the beginning of the film. I understand why Sonnenfeld chose to direct it the way he did – Agent J has become Agent K – but I don’t think it really worked. Will Smith just can’t play the “J-as-K” as well as Tommy Lee Jones can play “K”.
I also didn’t really like the two lines of dialog to describe where Linda Fiorentino’s character went. And I didn’t like J’s partner at the beginning of the film. Totally unbelievable as a Man in Black. (But he did have one funny line, which I won’t spoil, at the pie shop.)
Tony Shalhoub? Get a razor, man. The character looked much better clean-shaven.
Basically, the pre-Tommy Lee Jones stuff was weak. The “backstory”, such as it was (i.e., nearly non-existent) was glossed over much too quickly.
The film started to pick up after Tommy Lee Jones entered the story. I liked the Post Office scene. I liked the scene where he blows Jeebs’s head off. (J: “How did you know his head would grow back?” K: “It grows back?”) I liked the “follow the clues” bit. But the role-reversal just didn’t quite work for me. I like K as K and J as J. As I said, J as K left me flat.
Of course, I loved the ending. 
I haven’t seen MIB2, but my brother has, and he notes that Patrick Warburton (who plays Agent T) was also the star of Barry Sonnenfeld’s short-lived live-action TV show, “The Tick.”
So now you know where Agent T gets his name from.
I thought it was pretty good. Much better than the first one, which I didn’t care for (except for Vincent D’onofrio, who was hilarious). I found myself laughing out loud much more regularly than in the first one. Especially when Jones touched that blue sphere in the MiB storeroom. “All is lost! All is lost!” My friends and I missed most of the rest of that scene, we were laughing so hard. That, and the later scene with the locker in the bus terminal, were both obviously playing with the coda from the first movie, but realized it in a much more concrete and interesting manner by incorporating it into the plot of the movie, not just as a throw-away CGI Twilight Zone ending.
I thought the chemistry was much stronger between Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith this time around. I liked the way that, while Jones was retired, Smith was the hottest agent in the bureau, but as soon as Jones comes back, he starts trying so hard to prove himself he starts messing up again, just like in the first movie.
Even the sequences that should have been unbearable worked. The talking dog would have been death in almost any other movie, but here was actually able to score a few laughs. Even Johnny Knoxville did a passable job, which is impressive, considering this is a guy who started his career by regularly trying to give himself a concussion. Although the character did mysteriously vanish from the film after he and Serleena take over the MiB HQ, which was irksome.
I did have some problems with the movie. The villain was not nearly as interesting this time around, for starters. The ending was too abrupt and anti-climactic, although not nearly as bad as in the first movie. At least this one had some sort of a plot arc, however anemic, and even if the jokes were recycled from the first film, at least they made 'em funny this time around.
Erm… When Miller knocks the ending, it sounds like he’s talking about the resolution of the story. I was talking about the ending as in the last shot of the film.
Zuma, I’m sorry, I should have explained that the $6.50 was for a matinee showing. The full price at the AMC Eisenhower theater is $8.50, which I try not to pay. I’m not trying to say that MIB II is total crap–I realize it’s a light summer movie but I remembered how good the first one was, and it seemed that the filmmakers blatantly beat the same jokes to death instead of making new ones. I know that most sequels trade on the fact that the first movie set up the premise; the sequels should at least be made just as funny as the original. This movie was just okay in my opinion.
Regarding the perhaps undeserved screen time of Frank (you know, the pug), he became quite the center of attention for quite a few episodes of the MiB cartoon.
On the other hand, so did Agent L, who appears to have been written out of the whole frickin’ franchise altogether.
Personally, though I thought MiB2 was very funny (the aforementioned water globe for one, Frank waiting in the car - you know the scene - for another), I really was disappointed by how unoriginal much of it was. Perhaps it’s the sad fate of all sequels, but I expected…more. (Especially since MiB HQ is portrayed as downright HUGE in the cartoon, but apparently consists of one large room and one storage room in the movies.
Now, you see? That’s the sort of thing that should be left in. There’s nothing wrong with a two-hour movie.
Well, I beat you all in that I saw it for the equivilant of $2.50 US. And thats considered cheap even for Australia.
Anyway, it was a good waste of 1.5 hrs, nothing memorable but still a solid movie IMHO.
I paid for a Matinee movie for $4.00 in Upstate NY, (on vacation.) Anyways, I was very dissapointed in MIB II. It was shorter than I ever expected (which was good in this case) but it was pretty funny like the “Nutchin”. Kinda weird but it was funny. I also like the Michael Jackson thing too. Hehehe. But Surleena came out of nowhere! I wish there was some past history on her. I would take my $4.00 back if I could, I dont think its worth seeing unless your dying to kill an hour and a half.
I liked it too. I could hear the audience groaning when WLTDO started playing while Frank was waiting in the car.
Though it was too short.
MIB II sucked. Big time. Will Smith, having just totally kicked ass as Ali, looked bored beyond belief. “Phoning it in” is putting it politely. Same for Tommy Lee Jones, who looked vaguely medicated. I hope they got paid real, real good for this one. The direction was…directionless, and the whole thing suffered Catastrophic Total Script Failure about ten minutes from the end. The Powerpuff Girls is easily twice the movie as this freeze-dried package of Corporate Entertainment Product The only bright side I can see is that Speilberg was the executive producer. Maybe this movie will pay for Minority Report, which has not been as successful at the box office as it deserves to be.
By the way, right before I saw MIB II I saw the Space Station IMAX movie. It was a much more satisfying experience.