Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are the reason to see Men in Black: International—she has a comic precision that nicely deflates his humorous hubris—but for some reason the movie doesn’t bring them together until a third of the way in, after failing to establish any real sense of their characters. Mostly the film, directed by F. Gary Gray, gives us plot, plot, and more plot, laid out in scenes that only vaguely make sense as they unspool. Ungainly transitions are masked over with an off-tone score (credited to Danny Elfman and Chris Bacon) and there are so many wacky aliens that few of them really register. Insert joke here about this being as forgettable as a neuralyzer.
