tek's rating: ¾

Men in Black: International (PG-13)
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The film starts in 2016 in Paris, where MIB agents H and T fight off an invasion by aliens called the Hive, through a portal at the top of the Eiffel Tower. We don't see how the battle goes, however, before the scene flashes back twenty years to 1996, in Brooklyn. (I could have sworn the text on screen said "20 years later", but I must have misread it. I'm too lazy to rewatch the scene, but I'll just assume it said "20 years earlier".) A man sees an alien, and agents show up and neuralyze him and his wife, but not their daughter, Molly, who they think is asleep. She actually sees the alien, too, and helps it escape from the agents who are looking for it. After that, the movie flashes forward to the present (2019), when Molly (Tessa Thompson) has spent the rest of her life searching for aliens and hoping to join the agency she saw that night when she was a kid. She finally finds evidence of an alien landing on Earth, and secretly tracks the agents who apprehended him back to MIB headquarters. At first they plan to neuralyze her and send her away, but she convinces Agent O (Emma Thompson) to give her a chance as a probationary agent, called M. She sends M to the London branch of MIB, without any clear idea of what she's supposed to do there, just that O has had a bad feeling about that branch for some time now.

The London branch is led by Agent High T, and the top agent there is H (Chris Hemsworth). M cons her way into joining H, who usually works alone, on a mission involving an alien royal named Vungus, who just wants to have a good time during his layover on Earth, but needs protection. A pair of aliens attack Vungus, and H and M try to get Vungus away from the nightclub they were at, but the aliens cause a car crash. While H is fighting the alien assassins, M talks with the dying Vungus, who gives her a strange object to keep safe. Most of the rest of the movie involves M and H trying to keep the object, which turns out to be the most powerful weapon ever created, out of the wrong hands. That is, the two aliens who killed Vungus, and who appear to be working for the Hive. The object eventually falls into the hands of an alien arms dealer named Riza Stavros (Rebecca Ferguson), whom H used to date. (At one point while H is fighting her bodyguard, there's a fun actor allusion in which H tries to use a hammer against the alien, which calls to mind his most famous role as Thor.) Meanwhile, there's also a mole inside the London branch of MIB, and H and M have to figure out who that is. Things are complicated by an agent called C, who doesn't like H and tries to thwart his mission protecting the alien weapon. But M gets some help from a small alien whom she calls "Pawny", since he was a pawn in set of living chess pieces, who had failed to protect his queen.

I don't want to spoil any more about the plot, so I'll just say I thought it was reasonably fun, with lots of cool special effects and stuff, but not quite as good as previous movies in the franchise.


science fiction index
Men in Black * MIB: The Series * MIB II * MIB 3 * MIB International