I did not have high hopes for this film, the trailers did not seem very interesting and the concept feels a little old. I happened to be in Austin this weekend and I wanted to see a movie in one of the Alamo Drafthouse Theaters and this was the one that was starting at the right time so it ended up being selected simply because of lucky timing. As it turned out it was very entertaining and there is nothing the makers of the film should hang their heads about. I think the lack of success is mostly franchise fatigue and an abundance of similar products in the marketplace.
Chris Hemsworth is still trying to break out as a star outside of the MCU, and you can see why he might choose a part like this. Although I liked him very much in some of the other films he has made, his charisma is still stuck in the God of Thunder role he has owned for a decade now. Tessa Thompson is re-matched with him and they have pretty good chemistry but neither character brings the persona the two original stars did to their parts. It seems you need more than a black suit and a lot of CGI to make this concept work.
Fortunately, there are some funny bits of dialogue and some visual gags that will keep things interesting, but it can never match the charm that the first movie had. If I were ranking however, it would certainly beat MIB 2 which had very little going for it. The concept here suggests there is a traitor in MIB. The trailer makes it seem as if the "Hive", the supposed antagonist in the story is replicating MIB agents and replacing them. That is misleading, although there is a pretty obvious character to suspect, not because of the script but because casting demands that you make use of someone of that stature in an appropriate manner.
The shift of the story to Europe is fine and it allows for a few ethnocentric jokes at the expense of Americans, the French, and the British. There is also a sequence set in North Africa and the Mediterranean, so we get a pretty good travelogue as we go through the acts in the film. There may be a little too much of the cutie pie alien in the story, but I did not find him annoying, just a little obvious as to his role function as comic relief. Rebecca Ferguson, Liam Neesen and Emma Thompson are also in the film, and they have slightly better roles. Everybody seems to have a letter code name, which would leave you to believe that there can't be more than 26 MIB agents at any given time, but that is clearly not the case. There must be some other explanation.
So MIB International is not an important movie or essential to any comic book narrative, but it is an entertaining couple of hours that is not too taxing on the brain. If you still like all the CGI transformations, gadgets and aliens, then you should have a pretty good time.
