Starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Lara Flynn Boyle, Rosario Dawson and Rip Torn. Rated PG.

Planet Earth is in grave danger again and only one man can stop the evil alien Kylothian queen, Serleena, from destroying the third rock from the Sun. Or can he?

Perhaps not.

After neuralising yet another partner, Agent J is forced to track down his old colleague, Agent K, and convince him to come back for deneuralising.

Tucked away in a sleepy-town post office, Kevin knows there is more to his being than plain-brown paper and binding twine. It's just a feeling of something special when looking at the stars at night - an intangible and niggling feeling that we are not alone in the universe.

So, when J turns up and offers him a chance to scratch the itch in his life, Kevin hesitates but a moment to don the last suit he'll ever wear - again.

Serleena rounds up all the scum of the universe and turns them loose on an unsuspecting planet in search of an illusive light, secreted here 30 years ago, that will afford her awesome power. If she doesn't get what she came for, well, she'll just blow the whole planet to dust, just like that.

Men in Black II is populated by an awesome array of alien characters which I'm sure the special effects guys had a real blast in developing.

But having said that, it seems a lot of time, money and effort was wasted on mere wallpaper. But they had to do something to fill the ever-so-boring gaps between gags. Look, I won't pull any punches on this one. I haven't been so bored in a modern suburban Cineplex in quite a long time. If you have seen the movie trailer you have seen most of the gags. And if you saw "the making of" doco on the box recently, you've seen all the good bits. The rest, as I say, is wallpaper. And, to be brutally honest, there wasn't much of that either -- MIIB was also one of the shortest movies I have seen in a long time.

The ending was very lame. It was as if the makers had run out of either ideas or money or both and decided to just wrap the whole thing up and send it out, resting on the laurels of its predecessor, relying on the reputation of its stars and the gullibility of the average moviegoer, hoping to rake in millions at the box-office.

If I have any influence on you at all, take my advice and spend your money on something more worthwhile. There's plenty out there.

Two shamrocks