ive years after the original Men in Black, Agent J (Smith) patrols the streets of New York alone. Actually it's not so much that he's alone as that he keeps neuralizing his partners. None of them can stack up to his mentor, the legendary Agent K (Jones).
But fate is about to intervene in J's life, requiring him to go find his former partner, neuralized at the end of the last movie and now leading a quiet life in the postal service. See, there's something called the light of Zartha, which supposedly made a brief stopover on Earth 25 years ago, and an alien named Serleena (Boyle) who thinks it's still here and is ready to blow up the Earth for it, and only Kay knows what it's all about, except now he doesn't, and there's a guy with two heads, and a girl. ...
Well, Will Smith's self-indulgent closing number explains the plot about as well as it can be explained. Although it made a ton of money, Men in Black II didn't really win the hearts of audiences when it hit theaters in the summer of 2002. The movie brought back a checklist of favorite elements from the original, but didn't really come together. It was by no means an offensive train wreck on the scale of director Barry Sonnenfeld's previous Will Smith summer extravaganza, Wild Wild West. But whatever that wispy and elusive quality is that makes a movie connect with an audience, the first Men in Black had it, and Men in Black II did not.
Nonetheless, the marketing machine rolls on. Men in Black II got the full treatment—complete with video game—and an obligatory part of that is the ornate special-edition DVD. In this case, a two-disc set packed to the gills with features. The first disc includes the film itself, with commentary track by Sonnenfeld, and some interactive features. The second is loaded with shorts on various production aspects, animatics and dissections of special-effects shots, the music video for Will Smith's closing song, a blooper reel and an alternate version of the ending. Additional DVD-ROM features for those viewing the disc on their PCs include screen savers, the script and a demo of that crucial video game.
Less than the sum of its parts
This DVD edition of Men in Black II presents the reviewer with an unusual dilemma: a really well-done DVD presentation of a not terribly good movie. How does one grade that? Certainly the DVD is an impressive piece of work. The set includes a ton of extras connected by a well-designed interface, all wrapped up in a set of fun animated menus.
The first disc offers several options alongside the usual trailers, subtitles and alternate-language tracks. These include a set of very brief—about three-minute—featurettes on specific creatures. An "alien broadcast" feature displays an icon when those aliens appear, allowing viewers to jump out of the movie to watch the featurette.
Sonnenfeld's commentary track is also good. An interesting experiment here is an optional "telestrator" feature that lets Sonnenfeld actually draw on the screen while the movie's running, like John Madden diagramming a football play. It's an intriguing idea, but turns out to be pretty useless in practice.
The second disc offers a truckload of featurettes, including repeating the creature featurettes from disc one's "alien broadcast" in a standalone format. There's also a mostly entertaining set of slightly longer documentaries on specific aspects of production. A plus is that the producers generally chose less well-known parts of the filmmaking process to explore, like dialogue looping and orchestration. Both sets have their own navigation interfaces, letting viewers watch them individually or all in sequence.
The multi-angle scene deconstructions examine a generous number of special-effects sequences. They include as many as five different "layers" of the same shots. They're interesting, but a bit bewildering. This feature might have worked better with a commentary from someone explaining what viewers are seeing and why it's done that way.
Overall, a lot of hard work and talent were lavished on the DVDs. Watching them, it becomes clear this is true of the movie, too. Indeed, Men in Black II may be one of those movies that just works better on DVD. The features make the movie seem more interesting than viewers who've just watched it remember it being. It's an odd feeling. The DVD seems to show that the problem with Men in Black II was that it just added up to less than the sum of its parts. Skipping around those parts on disc is actually a lot of fun, and may be the best way to watch the movie.
