“Men in Black II” (2002) assumes you saw the original, so it doesn’t spend a lot of time justifying all the aliens and strange plot twists. Actually, it doesn’t spend a lot of time doing anything. It’s barely over 90 minutes long. I will say this: As far as being a hybrid of sci-fi, action and buddy cop flicks, it does about as good a job as the original. Even the surprising undercurrent of poignancy remains, though barely. They just don’t seem to be trying very hard. Or maybe Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones just make it look easy.
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The Simpson-Bruckheimer action recipe is like cinematic comfort food for the adrenaline starved. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence serve up an explosive bowl of macaroni and cheese in “Bad Boys for Life” (2020). Twenty-five years after the first installment of the franchise, cars still explode at the slightest provocation, guns still have unlimited bullets and helicopters still helicopt. Also, bad guys still can’t shoot worth a damn and story lines still take a backseat to blowing shit up. This time Smith’s Mike Lowrey has some kind of Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader thing going on. Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter.
Two thirds of the way through “Collateral Beauty” (2016) I was starting to wear down. The story, about a man (not) coping with his daughter’s death, was work. But I hung in there. This deep dive of a film let me up enough to see the surface, even if I couldn’t take a breath just yet. I thought I had the plot twist figured out. I was (almost) right. I didn’t go away happy, but at least I wasn’t sad. This kind of film is OK, once in a while. The cinematic world can’t be all superheroes and fart jokes.
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