The Powerpuff Girls

Suits, Shades, and Sugar Water

I rewatched *Men in Black* the other night, expecting a pure 1990s blockbuster thrill. What I got instead was a movie about bureaucracy. Strip away the slime and gadgets, and it’s basically a workplace comedy about the worn-out grind of policing immigration on a cosmic scale. It’s oddly funny to think the first line of defense against alien destruction is a handful of exhausted civil servants in cheap suits, operating with zero oversight and endless dependence on caffeine.

Barry Sonnenfeld directed this one, and his style is unmistakable. Before stepping behind the camera, he shot the Coen brothers’ *Raising Arizona* and *Blood Simple*. That same slightly warped, wide-angle feel shows up here. He doesn’t do frenetic, modern franchise staging. Instead, he often locks into these formal, almost stubbornly static master shots while total absurdity unfolds within them. The effect feels curious and observational. Roger Ebert was spot-on in 1997 calling it “a refreshing Bronx cheer aimed at movies that think $100 million budgets equal solemnity.”



The movie’s magic hinges on the pairing of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Smith was deep in his climb toward box-office superstardom, yet he does something quite subtle here. He’s the audience stand-in, wide-eyed and reactive to the chaos with the perfect balance of disbelief. Jones, on the other hand, is the steady rock. He isn’t trying to be an action hero—he’s a man who has suffered one too many shifts at a soul-crushing desk job. Check his posture. He strolls through a room of shrieking, tentacled creatures like he’s just waiting for the clock to strike five. His refusal to react makes every bit land that much harder.

Then there’s Vincent D’Onofrio. I still don’t quite understand how a performance that grotesque slipped into a PG-13 summer flick, but I’m grateful it did. As Edgar, a brutal farmer, he has his body drained by a giant cockroach that proceeds to wear his skin like an awful Halloween mask.



D’Onofrio’s physicality here is genuinely unnerving. To get that stiff, jerky gait, he apparently locked his knees with athletic braces and taped his ankles. There’s a scene early in the film where he demands sugar water from his terrified wife. The way he shambles into the kitchen—jutted jaw, skin rippling around his neck—is pure body horror. He pulls his face into shapes no human face should make. Janet Maslin wrote in *The New York Times* that the film “is actually a shade more deadpan and peculiar than such across-the-board marketing makes it sound.” She nailed it. It’s gross, yes, but it’s also brilliant.

Underneath the jokes, though, there’s an unexpectedly tender streak in the script. The aliens aren’t invaders—they’re refugees and immigrants. Most are just trying to get by, running newsstands, driving cabs, earning a living on the streets of Manhattan. The film suggests people are fundamentally decent; it’s the fear of the unknown that makes things ugly. “A person is smart,” K tells J. “People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”



It’s a cynical line, but the film itself isn’t cynical. It runs a tight 98 minutes. No filler. No overblown exposition. It just tells its strange little tale and steps aside. And it leaves us with that final, lingering shot—pulling back from Earth, beyond our solar system, past the Milky Way, until our whole known universe is revealed to be just a marble in a bag, toyed with by some endless alien hand. It’s a reminder: maybe we’re not the center of anything. Maybe we’re just another stop on the border.