8 years after their first big screen romp, the boys are back for another explosive go through the streets of Miami. Martin Lawrence is still obnoxious but, again, he’s tolerable opposite the always charismatic Will Smith. I can’t get enough of their hilarious old-married-couple bickering – I often write about the homoerotic undertones of buddy-cop movies, but here it’s so obvious that they go right out and have a scene in which Lawrence’s Marcus tells Smith’s Mike that his “ass still hurts from what [he] did to it.” “I got caught up in the moment!”
I should probably give you a plot summary now, but this isn’t that kind of movie. Take tons of Ecstasy, a Cuban drug lord, the KKK, the Russian mob (led by an amusingly sleazy Peter Stormare) and a LOT of corpses and coffins, mix them all up in Miami and throw two bad cops in there, that’s your plot. And when I say “bad cops”, I don’t mean bad-as-in-good, I mean that Mike and Marcus are the worst cops in the world! They’re constantly brutalizing suspects, breaking into places without warrants, shooting up a storm, endangering civilians and destroying everything in their way. Lousy police work… But it makes for an extremely foot-to-ass movie!
Michael Bay‘s style doesn’t reach further than making everything real fast and loud and shiny, but he knows how to make you sit up and go “DAMN!” over and over. “Bad Boys II” is full of hardcore violence, with corpses used as comedic props and people being chopped or blown up to pieces. Then you’ve got craaazy car chases that turn Miami into a demolition derby, with cars smashing into cars and even cars being THROWN at other cars. I was literally dodging in my seat! There’s also tons of shoot-outs, with Will Smith in full-on badass mode, like some kind of Chow Yun-SHAFT supercop, and Martin Lawrence going crazy over all the flying bullets: “Trying to break the world record for gunfights in a week?” With apologies to Joe Carnahan, THIS is the movie that should be called “Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane”!
Most critics think Michael Bay is Satan, but I don’t. His movies are flashy, noisy messes, but I like the stupid things. A flick like “Bad Boys II” isn’t original or meaningful and there’s less character development than in an episode of COPS, but it’s balls-to-the-wall action-packed and funnier than most comedies. It made the 12 year old in me really happy.