MEN IN BLACK (64)

Directed by: Barry Sonnenfeld

Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Linda Fiorentino, a very cute cat

The Pitch: A government agency is responsible for monitoring - and covering up all evidence of - extraterrestrial life on Earth.

Theo Sez: There, now - was that so difficult? A summer movie that has its share of dumb scenes (the one where MiB Smith mistakes Fiorentino's attempted warnings for crude sexual advances being probably the nadir), but also glimmers of what turned us all on to summer movies in the first place, back in the (relatively) halcyon mid-80s days of GHOSTBUSTERS. Like that movie, this features icky FX beasties and an eponymous theme song (cannibalising an 80s hit) but also solid, straightforward plotting and a certain low-key charm - it's not afraid to almost throw things away, from the sly pun on "aliens" in the opening sequence to incidental details like ETs' hankering for Russian food (Cold War echoes of Soviet "otherness"). It seems almost old-fashioned, with riddles to be deciphered (the whole "Orion's belt" business) and a villain who / which must be destroyed by guile as much as force ; yet it's also an unabashedly blatant slice of what you might call pre-millennial paranoia, the conviction that Something Big is about to happen in the world - and hence that, if we can't see any evidence of this, it can only be because They are covering it up. It's a peculiarly 90s sensibility, borne perhaps of people leading ever more insulated lives in the age of TV and (yes) the Internet, tending to view the outside world condescendingly and / or with suspicion : "People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals," as the film puts it. It's a cold worldview and (especially on second viewing) there's a slightly cold, mechanistic quality about the movie too ; fortunately there's also Tommy Lee Jones, able to turn deadpan comedy into blank-eyed world-weariness with only a subtle slackening of his lived-in features and finding profound sadness in his few short moments of back-story. He supplies the movie with its beating heart ; and even GHOSTBUSTERS didn't have that.