Release Date: July 18, 2003
Starring: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Joe Pantoliano, Jordi Molla, Henry Rollins
Directed by: Michael Bay
Written by: Ron Shelton, Cormac Wibberley, Marianne Wibberley
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Entertainment
MPAA Rating: R (strong violence, language, sexuality, drug content)
Bad Boys II sums itself up in the following scene, which happens fairly early in the movie: While eating lunch with the Burnett family, Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Matrin Lawrence) have an amusing conversation about the poor condition of Marcus's aboveground pool. Soon after, that same pool collapses and sends Marcus cascading into the nearby ocean, and in the middle of everyone’s laughter Mike gets a call on his cell phone regarding the location of the Miami police department’s next drug bust. In essence, it’s a small but tangible scrap of plot following an extended period of seemingly ad-libbed, almost irrelevant comedy. Like the rest of the movie, it’s proof that director Michael Bay didn’t allow any of this over-produced action extravaganza to rely on the story -- only his ability to provide said extravaganza in all shapes and sizes.
That call to Smith’s character might as well have been producer Jerry Bruckheimer reminding the actor to stop clowning around and get back to the story. The problem is that, even though it took eight years and three different writers, there’s only a trace of an actual narrative for Bad Boys II. Left to their own devices, the cast and crew get far too carried away with their own antics and, when they're not cracking jokes, propagating an excessive amount of senseless violence. This is probably what we should expect from Pearl Harbor director Michael Bay, who is Hollywood’s king of excessiveness, but not from Smith, Lawrence, or even Bruckheimer (though Bay is more or less Bruckheimer's protegé).
As with most high budget actioners, everything on screen looks slick and expensive, but this movie is definitely all show and nothing else. Much of the action and photography is impressive to a certain point but unlike solid action movies such as Die Hard or even the original Bad Boys, this sequel lacks all purpose for that action. Frankly, it works best as a three-minute trailer that crams all of its best comedy, explosions, and car chases into one brief display. As an unnecessarily long 150-minute film, however, it’s a bloated and meaningless summer popcorn flick with treats that are few and far between.
The script that Bay and Bruckheimer finally settled on (co-wrtten by the quickly fading Ron Shelton of Dark Blue and Hollywood Homicide credit) reunites officers Burnett (Lawrence) and Lowrey (Smith), who are still working for the narcotics department of the Miami police. It turns out that a powerful Cuban drug lord named Johnny Tapia (Jordi Mollà) is planning to smuggle the largest amount of ecstasy ever into the United States, and somehow Lowrey knows when and where the drugs will arrive. Their bust goes wrong, however, and they hardly recover anything. But they run into Marcus’s sister Sydney (Garbrielle Union), who happens to be a DEA agent working the same case from the inside, and with this new angle to work from, they set out to bring Tapia down.
The question is whether or not those funny moments were part of the screenplay or if Bay simply allowed Smith and Lawrence to make up scenes as they went. For the most part, the duo are enjoyable to watch, but once it becomes clear that little to no care was taken in creating a reason for the movie's action (car chases and explosions seem to materialize out of thin air), the fun turns into tedium. Clearly, more money and work was put into the eye candy and star power and hardly any into the writing -- meaning there isn’t much reason to get excited over anything.
The main villain, played by Spanish actor Jordi Mollà, is especially dull and provokes few reasons to hate him. This is mostly the story’s fault, however, but the fact that director Bay gave more time to his wise-cracking stars to do their funny thing in a plethora of unnecessary scenes speaks volumes about the real value of the villain. At certain moments, it’s almost as if Bay didn’t edit the film at all, and instead left in every second of action and comedy, no matter how pertinent it was to the film as a whole.
In one scene, for instance, in which Marcus and Mike brutally intimidate a young man picking up Marcus’s daughter for a date, is completely uncalled for. It happens late in the movie and has absolutely no bearing on the story whatsoever, and it’s something that may not have even been appropriate for the deleted scenes feature of the movie’s DVD. Until that point, it wasn’t even clear if Lawrence’s character had a daughter, and that family element is something Bay and company actually pulled off quite well in the original Bad Boys.
Moments like this are frequent in Bad Boys II, making it a stage for a bunch of Hollywood A-listers to show off how little care they need to put into making a movie. To put it nicely, it’s the quintessential popcorn bucket sequel. The unfortunate thing is that it does little to set its standards any higher than that, so it’s safer not to waste your time on it.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)