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  • Aluminum Christmas Trees: One of the "alien creatures" in the Chinese restaurant is a real creature called a blob fish.
  • Awesome Music: "Back in Time"
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The last scene of the movie, where Griff notices that Agent K forgot to pay for his meal, and cuts to an asteroid headed towards Earth. When Agent K returns and pays, the asteroid collides into a satellite instead. Griff's reaction (Oh, Crap! to sigh of relief) implies that there was a correlation between these two seemingly unrelated events, which remains unexplained.
  • Catharsis Factor: Present!Boris caught in the turbine where he gets totally annihilated and same goes for Past!Boris after he kills J's father taunting Young K with it so he gets captured like before, only for that to not be what happens to him instead.
    Boris: Go ahead, arrest me!
    BANG!
  • Complete Monster: Boris the Animal is by far the most murderously sadistic villain in the films, and easily the most personal. He is introduced being freed from prison by his prison mail girlfriend, whom he lets die when she is blown out into space, and kills another prisoner whom he promised to take with him. He travels back in time to eliminate K as personal revenge for destroying his arm when he was captured, causing a present day invasion by his race of Boglodites to consume everyone on Earth, which is his ultimate goal. Boris despises his nickname of the Animal, and will kill anyone who refers to him by it. A remorseless butcher who isn't afraid to kill anyone in his way, he kills a number of targets in the past, finds his past self so pathetic he only refrains from killing him because he would be erased from time, and murders J's father out of spite for being thwarted by K.
  • Genius Bonus:
    • Agent W is undercover as Andy Warhol. He begs to be reassigned and K says he'll see what he can do. We never find out if he was ever let go, but Andy Warhol didn't die until 1987, 18 years later.
    • The Apollo 11 astronauts pretending not to see aliens is something Apollo 8 was suspected of thanks to the line "please be informed there is a Santa Claus" line when orbiting the Moon.note 
  • Harsher in Hindsight: J claiming "You know, I'd have NO problem pimp-slapping the shiznit out of Andy Warhol!" can be a little bitter after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in the face at the 2022 Oscars ceremony.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: This exchange from the first movie is both depressing and very sweet in light of the events of this movie. In the first movie, it was a throwaway joke, but here we learn K felt guilty for getting J's father killed and has been watching over him ever since. No wonder he knew J would make a great MIB agent: it was in his blood.
    J: Did you ever flashy-thing me?
    K: No.
    J: I ain't playing with you, K. Did you ever flashy-thing me?
    K: No.
    • Furthered by another quote towards the end of the first film; "You should've been here for the Zeronian migration in 1968. I guess you weren't even alive in '68...", which could be K repressing the awful memory so that J stays none the wiser and isn't reminded of it.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ho Yay: J steps this up a lot with agent K with J doing married couple style arguing with K in the present and in the 1960's. Plus J's time traveling mission to save K from being killed and erased from existence is just filled with ho yay. Lampshaded at one point by J.
    • The diner scene in 1969 throws almost all subtlety to the wind.
      Young K: What about you, slick? You got yourself a girl?
      J: I got you.
  • Laughably Evil: Boris is an interesting case. He's dead serious, but he has such perfect zingers that it's hard not to laugh.
  • Memetic Mutation: "Just because you see [x] does not mean [y]. I mean, it is [y], but not because I'm [x]." explantion 
  • Moe: Griffin, the human-looking alien who can see the future.
  • Narm: The scene where J uses his time machine to learn how to dodge Boris the Animal's spikes via Bullet Time is somewhat undercut by their sudden, and likely unintentional Cooldown Hug.
  • Older Than They Think: Time travel devices being illegal devices and a villain going back in time to remove K from history is a plot of one of the early seasons of Men in Black: The Series , though rather than being a vengeful alien terrorist, the villain is a xenophobic human and conspiracy nut who removes the founding members of the MIB who made first contact with aliens.
  • One-Scene Wonder:
    • Andy Warhol a.k.a. Agent W (played by Bill Hader) steals the show.
    • Nicole Scherzinger as Boris's girlfriend, where she breaks him out of jail and dies in the attempt.
    • Colonel Edwards, AKA J's father, who end up sacrificing his life for K.
  • Retroactive Recognition: The Colonel, J's father is Luke Cage.
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The movie received far better reception than Men in Black II, which was widely seen as a mediocre rehash of the original.
  • Ugly Cute: The blue and red baby-like crustacean that Wu was serving to unsuspecting tourists in his restaraunt.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: When J shows up to what used to be K's apartment, the toddler comments "Mommy, the President's drinking my milk", explicitly tying the present-day part of the film to the only period of American history so far when the President of the United States was dark-skinned—though the second movie did make it a point to say it was 2002 (that being five years after the first film as was indeed stated) and this one saying 1969 is about forty years in the past from the present.

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