Men in Black: International (2019) * *

Directed by:  F. Gary Gray

Starring:  Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Rebecca Ferguson, Rafe Spall, Kumail Nanjiani (voice)

MIB International is not the fourth installment featuring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, who made the first three installments a lot of fun, and in the case of Men in Black 3, poignant.   Instead, we have Chris Hemsworth as Agent H and Tessa Thompson as Agent M.    The agents receive their names based on the first initial of their first name, so what happens if more than one agent has a first name beginning with H or M?    There are only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, mind you, but none of the Men in Black movies to date have had to deal with his issue.  

Hemsworth and Thompson, who previously starred together in Thor: Ragnarok, try hard, but this is all ground we've covered before.    There isn't much else that can be done with the Men in Black universe.    Once you've seen one nasty alien who wants to take over the universe, you've seen them all.    MIB International feels more like a retread than a continuation, or even a sequel we weren't exactly clamoring for.  

The action starts in 2016, in which Agent H and High T (Neeson) storm the Eiffel Tower in hopes of vanquishing a dangerous breed of alien, the Hive, from existence.    Since the action cuts to a flashback from 1996 before we see the agents dispense with the Hive, we know they likely didn't succeed, even though the official story says they did.    The 1996 scenes show Molly (who will grow up to be Agent M) witnessing her parents encounter the Men in Black and befriending the cute alien the MIB are after.    She helps the alien escape and avoids the dreaded neuralizer which erases the memory of those who look directly at it.

Flash forward the twenty-plus years later, Molly tracks down the secret headquarters of MIB and becomes an agent-in-training.    She is shipped off to London, where she is teamed with H, who we are told is not the same go-getter agent he was before he confronted the Hive in Paris.    He drinks, parties, sleeps at his desk, and has a devil-may-care attitude toward his work.    Faster than you can say the Hive, M and H are on the run from intergalactic assassins and keeping a mysterious object given to them by a slain alien ally safe.    And there is a mole inside MIB, whose identity is easy to determine.    All you have to do is rule out the agent who doesn't get along with H and M, and you can easily figure out the rest.     

H's former lover, a notorious three-armed arms dealer named Riza (Ferguson) may hold the key to defeating the bad guys, but she isn't exactly thrilled with how H ended their relationship.    Would it shock anyone to discover that M will run into the alien she helped twenty years earlier again?    F. Gary Gray is a veteran director who knows his way around an action scene, but the chemistry of Smith and Jones is missing.    They brought their own unique attitudes to the material.    Smith is more animated as he meets one odd alien after another.   Jones treats all of this as if it were the most normal thing in the world.    He's seen it all, and it takes Smith a while to catch up.

Hemsworth and Thompson aren't Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, and there isn't much about their characters which would distinguish them in MIB lore.    There aren't a lot of thrills or laughs, and MIB International lacks a villain as memorable as Vincent D'Onofrio's bug man in the first film.    The first three films were high comedy.   MIB International is by rote.