MEN IN BLACK (1997) ** It's not unusual for a film based on a literary work to lack the intelligence, spiritual depth, or high drama of the original. This film, however, may be the first time that this model fits a cinematic work based on a comic strip. I can't be sure, I haven't read the comic. Tommy Lee Jones should know better, but is somewhat entertaining anyway. Will Smith obviously doesn't know better, and is slightly entertaining as always. Linda Fiorentino probably thought she needed the cash, and suffers precious little exposure to get it. The huge commercial success of the work should be no mystery: at a time that even the most dense Americans were acknowledging the clear reality that US government and policy is conducted by concealed and ominous undercurrents and agencies, it would be comforting to think that those invisible hands are really benevolent and operating in the interests of the common good. It probably is necessary to create a scenario in which alien spacecraft are "always" on the verge of destroying the earth in order to adorn US foreign policy with much beyond unbridled greed and culturocentric misanthropicism, but the American public apparently had little more difficulty swallowing this situational analysis than they did with the various explanations tendered by Reagan and Clinton.
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