Men in Blecch

It's kind of hard to say how you feel about the news of a movie franchise reboot when you learn that the company involved has decided not to cross the franchise with the cinematic version of 21 Jump Street.

Writers, release date and director for the rebooted Men in Black franchise are apparently set now, and the aforementioned Ultimate Idiocy of Known Space is off the table. The story at Variety suggests that the reboot will not try to duplicate the roles played by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones and will probably make one of the lead characters a woman.

The Men in Black in the movie were super-secret agents responsible for maintaining order on Earth and keeping secret the presence of aliens who often emigrated here in disguise or used our planet as a way-station traveling to somewhere else. Using a "standard-issue neuralyzer," the MiB could erase any memory of contact with them or an alien being and replace it with another that explained the strange circumstances people might vaguely recollect.

It was based on a six-issue comic book series that also traded on the idea of a conspiracy to hide the "real world" from the general populace, although in the comic the hidden world included supernatural elements and the MiB also killed in order to maintain their cover. It's significantly darker than the Smith-Jones movie of 1997.

Neither of the Men in Black sequels did as well as the original, even though the third movie featured Josh Brolin doing a dead-on hysterical impression of Tommy Lee Jones. The reasons not to reboot the franchise are many and varied; not the least of which are the fact that the concept worked because of the two lead actors' charisma, rapport and selling of the material. Revisiting the same concept with two other actors will bring...what, exactly? Ghostbusters ought to demonstrate what kind of empty vessel results when an old concept is brought back without any new idea to fill it out. Will the new version aim a little closer to the comic series' darker tones? That'll work: Remember that fun, light-hearted movie where Tommy Lee Jones deadpanned and Will Smith quipped their way through a battle with aliens? Now it will have evil zombies and mutants and the heroes will kill people! Bring the kids!

Sure, it's been 20 years since Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith teamed up to clean up "the worst scum of the universe," but nobody's used a neuralyzer on nearly enough people to make this idea any good. All it demonstrates is that once you've gone beyond lecherous actors, producers and such spinning stories as to why they're not guilty of what anyone else who did what they did would be guilty of, the creativity output of the modern movie industry drops to zero pretty quickly.