YMMV / Men in Black II

• Base-Breaking Character: Serleena is something of a divisive figure. While there are those that find her character pales in comparison to the previous film's antagonist and dislike the fact that she's a Femme Fatale, while others think she has plenty of her own charms and (ironically) like her femme fatale angle.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Serleena's introductory scene is iconic among vorarephiles.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The mugger scene. Immediately after arriving on Earth, Serleena transforms into a Victoria's Secret model and gets jumped by a man wielding a knife. She devours him alive with little effort then, after realizing that eating him makes her look fat and suspicious, barfs him up and steals his clothes. The scene is fairly abrupt, and afterwards no one mentions it again even when the MIB return to the site of Serleena's landing, where you think someone would mention the barfed-up dude at the crime scene.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Despite some critics at the time coming down on her pretty hard, Serleena has developed quite the fan base over time. Due to people loving her for her cold confidence, her Deadpan Snarker moments, her cool plant person powers, her sense of style and being something of a Shameless Fan Service Girl.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Serleena and Zed. At first it was implied that Zed was being boastful about it, but it turned out she did have a thing for him later on. Not that it stopped him from trying to fight her.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • J's quip about having to swap out the car's original black autopilot because "he kept getting pulled over," in light of the fact that J himself would end up being pulled over in the past during the events of the next film for no other reason than being a black man driving an expensive car.
  • Patrick Warburton, a.k.a. The Tick, having a cameo as a gung-ho agent is funny enough by itself. Then in the next movie, "the Tick"^note (specifically, being bitten by "the Horvatian Brain Tick") is posited as an explanation for J's weird behavior.
    O: Damn it. It's not the Tick.
    J: "Damn it, it's not the tick"? It's something worse than the Tick?
  • Rosario Dawson who played an alien/human hybrid would later play a Galactic Ranger in Ratchet & Clank and Ahsoka Tano in The Mandalorian.
  • The third movie establishes that most models are in fact aliens. This means that the lingerie model Serleena saw in the Victoria's Secret ad was almost certainly alien too, and if the mugger had jumped her instead of Serleena, it's possible he would've still met the same fate either way.
  • One of the clues K planted to jog his memory relies on a long standing video store reservation. Had things taken much longer, Netflix might have doomed the human race.
  • This film had Michael Jackson begging to be accepted into MIB as "Agent M". Men in Black: International would star a character who forced her way into MIB as their new Agent M.
• Ho Yay: The worms in one scene play a game of Twister and during the game, one of the worms keeps touching another one's butt thinking it was that worm's face, which irritates the other worm.
• Inferred Holocaust: Averted but lampshaded. After they have Laura, the Light of Zartha, leave the planet and destroyed her pursuer, K tells J to leave and head back to headquarters. J then points out that a great deal of people had witnessed what had happened with the implied possibility of having to a long night of neuralyzing all of New York before they can go back to HQ. K then puts on his sunglasses and non-verbally tells J to put on his sunglasses, and then activates a giant neuralyzer located within the Statue of Liberty's torch.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Because the original climax involved the World Trade Center, massive reshoots had to take place after the 9/11 attacks. As a result, this is the shortest MIB movie (a paltry 88 minutes) because huge swathes of content had to be cut.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common criticism of the movie. It doesn't feel like it does anything different and just amplifies a few favored jokes from the last film. Some fans would also have preferred seeing J with L or a new partner rather than undoing K's bittersweet arc from the first movie.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Again, Serleena gobbling up the mugger. There are some people who watch the film simply for that, and feel that the rest of the movie isn't worth watching.
• Memetic Mutation: A common phrase to compare a new trend with an out-dated one:
  *pointing at old trend* Old and busted.
  *pointing at himself (new trend)* New hotness.
• Narm: Jarra turns out to be... four small aliens with high-pitched voices riding tiny flying saucers, all hidden in a trench coat. Played by atrocious CGI. It's a massive Level Breaker and ruins the potential of the character.
• Pandering to the Base: The movie undoes the conclusion of the first movie in order to repeat (and overdo) the most talked-about gags of the original, like J and K's relationship, the Worms, Frank the Pug, Michael Jackson, the supercar, and an ending shot revealing Earth to be a small world contained in a giant alien world.
• Retroactive Recognition: One of the guys reporting to J in MIB HQ is Nick Cannon! And one of the two agents at the scene of the crime is one of Those Two Guys from Brooklyn Nine-Nine!
• Sequelitis: While the film was a box office hit, if only off of brand recognition, both fans and critics typically regard it as an inferior rehash of the original.
• Signature Scene:
  • The mugger scene. In part because of how sudden and out of left field it is, and because it features Lara Flynn Boyle in high heels and lingerie, and the way it plays out feeling like it was deliberately trying to lean into kink territory. A lot of people remember the movie most for this scene in particular, if nothing else.
  • Michael Jackson's cameo attracted a lot of new viewers after his tragic death in 2009, both due to the huge amounts of Posthumous Popularity Potential caused by his passing and the fact that his role features him engaging in Adam Westing.
  • J communicating with the alien post office worker to convince him to drop his disguise, all through beatboxing, is also talked about over how creative and unique it was.
• So Okay, It's Average: It's not a bad sequel, but re-uses way too many of the beats of the first movie that it just feels like a re-hash if slightly bigger (despite being shorter).
• Sophomore Slump: The movie is considered the most unremarkable in the trilogy, it retreads too much of what the first film established and lacks the unique direction and ideas of the third movie. To the film's credit though, when you take spin-off movies into account, it is still seen as far superior to Men in Black: International.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite being well liked and promoted to coprotagonist at the end of the first movie, L is Put on a Bus offscreen with just one sentence to explain her absence, in order to make room for the returning K, Frank the Pug, and J's new Love Interest Laura.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • J takes a neuralyzed K under his wing to try and stop a threat only K knew how to deal with, and the rest of MiB is compromised from the inside. Hotshot rookie J is now the jaded veteran, and K is the over-his-head smartass! ... for about thirty minutes. Once K is de-neuralyzed, he goes right back to his old self, and because they're following a trail of clues that only K understands, J regresses to once again being the naive rookie that K has to lead around and explain everything to.
  • J acting the mentor to L, with their Unresolved Sexual Tension and her less clownish demeanor keeping the writers from just repeating the first movie's J and K pairing.

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