Men in Black

Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black is a brisk, funny science-fiction comedy with a better double act than plot. We recommend it for Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, and for the director’s good sense in letting them remain interesting beside the creatures. The premise has Kay recruiting Jay into a secret organisation that regulates alien activity on Earth. It gives Ed Solomon’s screenplay a useful comic starting point: one man has plenty to learn, while the other would prefer to get on with the job.

Jones plays Kay as though there is nothing about this work worth raising his voice over. Smith’s Jay supplies the curiosity and the need for a response, which Jones is reluctant to provide. We laughed at how little Jones gives Smith to work with; his straight face makes the other man’s energy funnier. The pleasure is in watching them adjust to each other without the film turning every exchange into an explanation of their differences.

Solomon understands that the secret organisation is funny before anything goes wrong, because Kay has made ordinary work out of something Jay can scarcely take in. The New York setting helps: this is a place where an alien seems capable of becoming one more person with business to attend to. Sonnenfeld treats the extraterrestrial activity as routine, leaving Smith to register the strangeness. That restraint gives the visual jokes a chance, and stops the dialogue competing with every effect for attention.

Bo Welch’s production design gives the secret organisation a visual character of its own, without making the people look incidental. The elaborate surroundings allow for visual jokes without demanding that we stop and admire them. Donald Peterman’s cinematography keeps the human reactions readable amid the effects, which matters when Jones’s lack of astonishment is often the joke. There is enough to look at without making it hard to know where the laugh is.

Editor Jim Miller keeps the pace quick without sacrificing the pauses Jones needs, and the 98-minute running time is a considerable kindness to a premise this slight. There is time to enjoy the contrast between the leads, with little pressure to make their partnership feel profound. Danny Elfman’s score is more eager to announce the fun than Jones is, and occasionally busier than we need. It suits the film’s appetite for oddity, though we would happily hear the actors do more of the work.

The weakness is that Solomon has found more possibilities in the job than in the story built around it. Once the premise is established, the film has less to offer beyond another creature, another reaction and another contrast between the partners. Sonnenfeld keeps these pleasures coming, but cannot quite disguise how little curiosity the plot itself creates. We remain pleased to be in this company without becoming especially anxious about what happens next.

The buddy-film formula is familiar, and Sonnenfeld has no reason to apologise for using it. Jones and Smith make the unequal partnership feel easy, without asking either actor to become less distinctive. That is enough to keep this among the science-fiction comedies we would happily return to. Settle in for the pair of them, and do not expect the plot to be the subject of much conversation afterwards.