The only thing more irritating than over-long, overblown, stylistically excessive films like Bad Boys II is the size of the egos of the people behind them. In this case, the culprits are the usual suspects – director Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor, The Rock) and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down, Con Air, and just about every other obnoxiously excessive movie of the 1990s). And this time out, they’ve created a slick and sometimes quite funny bloodbath of a buddy cop movie, bringing back Will Smith and Martin Lawrence to reprise their roles from the 1995 original.
What’s irritating about it? Start with the 153-minute running time. Insubstantial movies like this should be barely more than half as long as this one, and the extreme length of this movie really does take away from the fun. It’s as if Bay thought he was creating some sort of masterpiece that simply couldn’t be tightened-up. Well, it could have been – even if his precious car chases and gun fights had to be retained at their full, ridiculous length. Of course, if they’d cut out the most obvious chaff – the movie’s romantic subplot, intertwined with the family complications of having cop Marcus’ (Lawrence) sister (Gabrielle Union) not only dating cop Mike (Smith), but also working undercover as a Drug Enforcement Agency agent on the same case as the buddy cops – well, if they’d cut that out, there’d be virtually no story left to the movie at all. Which is probably fine with the folks who enjoy this sort of film. The car chases and shooting and slow motion bullets flying through jugs of water, Marcus’ rear end, and then a bad guy’s head, would be intact, so those folks would be happy.
This is hyper-vacuousness at its best – a slickly produced film, no question. The action is intense and well choreographed. The special effects are extremely well done, and the screenwriting team of Jerry Stahl (who wrote the book Permanent Midnight) and Ron Shelton (who is now better known as a director than a writer) even managed to squeeze in a few excellent comedic scenes. The best of these feature Marcus and Mike tormenting Marcus’ daughter’s date when he arrives at the front door, and Marcus after the accidental ingestion of several ecstasy pills.
However, all the funny moments, violence and loud noises in the world can’t obscure the fact that this is a bloated, ludicrous, over-noisy empty-headed summer popcorn flick. And that would be the case even without the storyline’s pandering to America’s peculiar obsession with trashing Cuba (we are told that Fidel Castro’s government makes cocaine in Cuba and depends on drug cash. You’d think if there was so much evil about Castro, folks wouldn’t need to create fiction like this to make him a villain.). Don’t even start picking apart the plot, as this movie will fall to pieces within seconds if you do. Can you imagine an undercover agent standing beside a meeting place with her underworld chums, chatting with her cop boyfriend? No, it doesn’t make much sense, but nothing here does. Not the car chase that totals 22 cars and a boat; not the bad guy shipping money to his home in Cuba (how he can live in Florida and Cuba at the same time is never explained); and not the incoherence that results from Bay’s intentionally choppy editing and quick cuts.
Bad Boys II will satisfy those who liked the original Bad Boys, and it’ll appeal to those who like all of Bruckheimer and Bay’s films. For the rest of us, it’s well deserving of a pass.
All the funny moments, violence and loud noises in the world can’t obscure the fact that this is a bloated, ludicrous, over-noisy empty-headed summer popcorn flick.- Brian Webster
