"Men in Black II"

In order to find what the Boyle-squid creature is looking for before she does, Zed (Rip Torn again), asks Smith to pull Jones out of retirement. He's now a commanding postmaster in Truro, Mass., with no memory of all of his service with the Men in Black. The hope is that Smith can deneuralize him, convince him to come back into service and get him to figure out whatever happened to the Light of Zartha, which he had something to do with back in the day.

Complicated? It's really not, especially since we find out three times or so what Boyle is after and why. The problem is that the plot really doesn't matter. All you want the movie to do is roll, to keep the laugh lines coming. And it never happens.

Instead, Sonnenfeld takes us on a tour of all the places we went last time -- already a problem, since discovering the outlandish behind-the-scenes-of-New York rules of the original helped the movie unfold. Now, however, the film is aware of its own kitsch factor. The design in the first film was sort of a salute to the comic-book era that spawned the film. Here, old sci-fi, like the fake "In Search Of" television show that contains a major clue, is played for its flying-saucers-on-strings hokeyness.

Only new things are cool: Jones' hot Ford LTD has been replaced with a 2003 luxury sedan. The hotel room where the thin, cigarette-smoking worm guys live is a space age bachelor pad (complete with a joke baldly ripped out of "Being John Malkovich"). It's tacky, not cool, and the kitschy-coo joke is finished off with a game of Twister. And in the most garish insult, the first floor of Men in Black headquarters has been turned into a mall full of product placements. If there are going to be "Men in Black" toys, I can tell you which fast-food joint is going to carry them.

The movie isn't a total bust. There are a couple of good New York jokes, including a play on the fact that it's nearly impossible to faze New Yorkers and a crack about what those gigantic nitrogen canisters you see on street corners are actually for. (Although I was frustrated by one New York error: There are no lockers in Grand Central Station.) Smith and Jones are always fun to watch, of course, even if you never really buy the supposed friction between them. (Would someone stop Smith's rap career? It's getting harder to apologize for it.)

But this is a sequel that even recycles jokes from the original (celebrities are actually aliens), and finds more humor in a pug singing along to "Who Let the Dogs Out" than it does in acutely timed physical comedy.

What's so off-putting about the second episode of "Men in Black" is that besides coming back with the same stars, the same peripheral goofballs, the same look and the same set (almost), the sequel comes back to the exact same theme. The clever idea in "Men in Black" was that big things came in little packages.

Here that's a joke that keeps returning, and each time the punch line gets less funny. By the end of the picture, you realize that what seemed like a clever idea in the original is really just an extrapolation from -- what was it, "Animal House," when the professor gets stoned and imagines there might be a universe under his fingernails? And if there's a universe under his fingernails, then he could just be the dirt under God's fingernails.

Whoa.

In the end, you just wish that Will would turn the neuralizer on you: "You liked this movie. It wasn't a waste of your time. Didn't you enjoy the air conditioning?"

• View blog reactions