4 / 10
Official trailer
Men in Black: International is the franchise reboot that replaced Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones with Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson.
F. Gary Gray directed. Art Marcum and Matt Holloway wrote. Tessa Thompson plays Agent M, a young woman who has spent decades searching for the MIB after encountering them as a child. Chris Hemsworth plays Agent H, a senior London MIB operative whose past success against an alien invasion hasn’t aged well. Liam Neeson plays High T, the London branch head.
Rebecca Ferguson plays Riza Stavros, an arms dealer. Kumail Nanjiani voices Pawny, a chess-piece-sized alien sidekick. The plot involves a stolen alien weapon, a mole inside MIB, and the eventual reveal that High T is the antagonist.
A long sigh is about all I can muster for this one. I liked the 1997 original a great deal, and this reboot kept the name and lost the personality. Hemsworth and Thompson are likable performers stuck in a script that never figured out why it was being made, and I spent most of the running time waiting for the film to give them something to do.
The film made approximately two hundred and fifty-three million dollars worldwide on a one hundred and ten million dollar budget. The commercial performance was disappointing for Sony Pictures. The reviews were largely negative. The studio considered the franchise dormant after release. Later MIB content has been limited. The film is one of the clearer examples of a franchise reboot that prioritized demographic recasting over the property’s actual creative DNA.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
The film’s central commitment is replacing the Smith-Jones pairing with a woman and an attractive male partner. The replacement is the production’s main creative choice. The script doesn’t develop a new reason for an MIB film to exist.
The film exists because Sony wanted a diverse MIB cast and built a film around the wanting. Agent M’s introduction sequence positions her as the underestimated woman who has been smarter than the men around her since childhood.
Her first scene at MIB headquarters has her recruited because she doesn’t fit the agency’s traditional profile. The framing is that the agency needed the diverse hire to function properly.
The High T reveal is the film’s clearest ideological statement.
Neeson’s character is set up as Agent H’s mentor and the moral center of the London branch, and the third act reveals that the alien Hive has corrupted him. The structural argument is that the older, white, male authority figure can’t be trusted, and the diverse young team has to overcome him to save the world. I saw the twist coming the moment Neeson walked on as the kindly boss, and a reveal that surprises nobody isn’t worth much.
Agent M’s outsider perspective makes her able to see what the establishment can’t. The film argues that traditional MIB authority is the problem the new MIB has to fix.
Agent H, played by Hemsworth, is the film’s secondary ideological structure. H is set up as the legacy hero who needs to learn his glory days were overblown, and the film systematically dismantles his confidence. The audience learns that High T was the one who stopped the invasion and that H has been coasting on credit he didn’t earn. The waste hurts most. Hemsworth can be very funny, and the film spends his whole performance making him the punchline.
The new female lead has to teach him that his self-image is wrong.
For Writers
When a film exists to replace its predecessor’s protagonists with demographically different versions, the film inherits the burden of being interesting on its own terms. MIB International cast Hemsworth and Thompson, framed both characters in opposition to the previous male leads’ implicit politics, and didn’t give the new film its own reason for being. The lesson is that replacement narratives need to do more than replace. They need to make a case for the new characters as people worth following. Casting alone can’t make that case.
The London Waste
The decision to relocate the franchise to London is interesting and undeveloped. The 1997 MIB was about New York’s relationship with strange visitors. The London branch concept could have produced a film about how a different city handles the same situations. British MIB could have had different procedures, different cultural assumptions, different relationships with the alien populations living there.
The film doesn’t develop the London identity. The setting is mostly decorative. The London office looks like the New York office, and the British operatives behave like the American ones. The film could have been set anywhere. That’s nearly as disappointing, because a British MIB with its own procedures and its own aliens is a movie I’d have loved to see, and this one just parks the old formula in a new city.
For Writers
A setting change in a franchise should produce content specific to the new setting. International moved MIB to London without using London. The setting is decoration instead of substance. The lesson is that location matters in fiction. If your story moves to a new place, the new place should affect the story. Different cities have different cultures, vocabularies, and dynamics. Use them.
The Pawny Problem
Kumail Nanjiani’s Pawny is the film’s attempt at a memorable sidekick character. Pawny is a chess-piece-sized alien who attaches himself to Agent M as her loyal servant.
The character is intended to fill the role Frank the Pug filled in the original. Nanjiani is a skilled comedic performer. The Pawny character doesn’t work because the script gives him generic loyal-sidekick material instead of specific characterization.
The original Frank the Pug worked because he was a distinct character, an alien who had become a New York pug in his behavior, and the contrast between his appearance and his identity produced real comedy.
Pawny is just a small alien with a sword. The audience never learns what kind of person he is. He’s a function instead of a character. I like Nanjiani a lot, and it’s painful to watch a comedian that sharp handed nothing but loyal-servant lines.
For Writers
A comedic sidekick needs characterization beyond their structural function. International’s Pawny is a sidekick without a personality. The character delivers lines but doesn’t have a distinct voice. The lesson is that supporting characters need their own interiors even when their narrative purpose is small. Give the character quirks, opinions, and inconsistencies. A character is a person instead of a job description.
Craft Note
The Marrakech market chase is the film’s strongest individual action passage. Agent H and Agent M pursue alien arms-deal participants through a North African souk while attempting to maintain civilian-population cover. The sequence stages comedy and action together with specific spatial coherence. The Marrakech passage shows that F. Gary Gray (Friday 1995, The Italian Job 2003, Straight Outta Compton 2015) had craft to spare for action geography. The sequence is what an MIB International film built around specific international settings could have delivered consistently.
The rest of the film doesn’t match the Marrakech passage’s confidence.
Should you skip Men in Black: International?
4/10. The demographic recasting didn’t generate the brand revival the production hoped for, and I don’t think it could have, because casting was the only idea anyone brought. The Marrakech chase is the one stretch where I was having a good time, and it shows what this film might have been with a script behind it. The High T reveal and the Agent H dismantling are its ideological commitments, and neither one is any fun to watch. Watch the 1997 original instead.
