Review of Bad Boys II (2003) by Moviemastereddy — 02 Apr 2016

Hot Cars, Burning Rubber and Guys Good and Bad!

Let's begin with a traffic report. This has been an unusually chaotic summer on the freeways and boulevards of South Florida and Southern California — in the movies anyway. First there were Laurence Fishburne and Keanu Reeves somersaulting on top of a speeding semi in "The Matrix Reloaded" to the sound of grinding gears and complaining metal. This was followed in short order by the big chase at the end of "Hollywood Homicide," the Mitsubishi mating dance in "2 Fast 2 Furious" and Arnold Schwarzenegger swinging from the end of a giant crane in "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.".

Now, hoping to outdo them all in automotive wreckage and box office damage, here is "Bad Boys II," in which a posse of bad guys commandeers a trailer loaded with new cars that they drive at high speed along a stretch of Miami highway, flinging the cargo onto the road behind them at Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, who are in furious pursuit. "Did you see that?" Mr. Lawrence exclaims as a Buick spirals overhead. To which Mr. Smith replies: "They're throwing cars. How am I not going to see that?".

Later a different set of bad guys (not to be confused with the bad boys of the title, Mr. Smith and Mr. Lawrence, who are good guys) will do a similar trick, only with embalmed corpses, one of which is graphically decapitated by another vehicle. But perhaps it is time to cut away from the chase.

"Bad Boys II," in which Mr. Smith and Mr. Lawrence once again play a pair of Miami police detectives named Mike and Marcus, is the latest collaboration between Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced it, and Michael Bay, who directed. (Ron Shelton, director of the much better "Hollywood Homicide," helped write the screenplay.) This one follows in the tradition of the earlier Bruckheimer-Bay pictures — the first "Bad Boys," "The Rock," "Armageddon" and "Pearl Harbor" — all of which made a lot of money and were otherwise pretty much worthless.

Mr. Bruckheimer, who is routinely identified in publicity material as "the most successful producer of all time," is not a man for subtlety or for half measures. This summer he has, at least momentarily, outdone himself, releasing two movies — "Bad Boys II" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" — within 10 days. The two films have an aggregate running time just shy of five hours. ("Boys," at 144 minutes, is 11 minutes longer than "Pirates.") Anyone contemplating a double feature should come prepared with a large bottle of Tylenol. I can't say I recommend the experience, but it's your money, at least until Mr. Bruckheimer gets his hands on it.

Quite a bit was clearly spent on the assaultive, bombastic, and occasionally funny spectacle that is "Bad Boys II." Mr. Bay may lack restraint (also taste, wit and shame), but he does have an undeniable flair for sleaze, noise and vulgarity. One of his most impressive feats is to film a nightclub rave scene so that the camera glides under the skirts and between the legs of the women. There is something leering and nasty about this that makes the more pervasive ogling in "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" seem downright wholesome.

A similarly cold, aggressive voyeurism characterizes the film's violence, which is relentless and often gruesome. Corpses are probed for drugs hidden inside them; a bucket of severed limbs, still dripping blood, is placed on a dining-room table. Several times Mr. Bay uses slow motion to track the course of a speeding bullet, climaxing with its explosive, splattery impact on a human body. David O. Russell used a similar effect in "Three Kings" as a graphic and terrifying illustration of what a gunshot can do. Here it is meant to produce a dumb, visceral, involuntary thrill. The audience at the screening I attended responded on cue to each exploding cranium and mangled tosro, with oohs and oofs and wows (as well as less printable interjections), and so, helplessly, did I.

The cast, in contrast, appear fit and energetic. The best moments come when Mr. Smith and Mr. Lawrence are permitted to pause from their action-hero duties and run their funny, unpredictable mouths. At one point, to no discernible narrative purpose, they team up to terrify a young man who has come to take Marcus's daughter on a date, and their parody of thuggish bravado seems like a sly sendup of the movie itself.

The main difference between the partners is that Marcus is a family man (his infinitely patient wife is played, in too few scenes, by Teresa Randle), while Mike is, in his partner's words, "a dog." He also happens to be sweet on Marcus's younger sister, Syd (Gabrielle Union), an undercover federal agent who is mixed up in their case, and whose abduction by the chief bad guy occasions the unauthorized invasion of Cuba at the end of the movie.