"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
Subscribe To Weekly Newsletter!

BAD BOYS II
by Peter Sobczynski

July 18, 2003

ZERO STARS (Out of 4 stars)

FILM CREDITS: Written by Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl. Directed by Michael Bay. Starring Martin Lawrence, Will Smith, Gabrielle Union, Jordi Molla and Joe Pantoliano. R

In his immortal "Proverbs of Hell", the legendary poet William Blake wrote that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom". It is a good thing that Blake never lived to see "Bad Boys II" or he might have been forced to rethink his position. On the other hand, he might have been inspired enough by the sights and sounds to jot down dozens of new proverbs in order to capture in words a Hell that even he couldn’t have contemplated in his darkest nightmares. This is a film that is so bad that it forces me to consider whether I might have been a bit hasty when I recently claimed that "Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle" was one of the worst things ever produced by man. If I had to choose, though, I would probably have to give "Full Throttle" the edge for cruddiness simply because "Bad Boys II", to my knowledge, is relatively Demi Moore-free, unless that is her playing the large-breasted naked corpse that figures in one of the film’s more revoltingly unfunny scenes.

The film is, of course, the long-discussed sequel to the 1995 hit and while I am sure that I saw it, I really don’t remember anything about it other than the fact that it starred Martin Lawrence and Will Smith as a pair of mis-matched buddy cops and that a lot of stuff blew up. While the details are a blur, I am familiar enough with the genre-the violent cop film in which bodies are splattered in increasingly gruesome ways while people deliver just-as-gruesome quips during the carnage-so that I don’t feel that I need to brush up on the first one, even if someone held a gun to me head.

This time around, things kick off as Miami cops Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) are leading a bust of what they believe is a major Ecstasy deal involving a KKK group. Of course, things go wrong and the scene quickly devolves into a gunfight that even John Woo might have found excessive-thousands of rounds are shot, dozens of people have holes blown in their heads in loving close-up and, in the comedic high-point of the scene, Mike winds up accidentally shooting Marcus in the hinder. For some reason, director Michael Bay chooses to show this moment in such prolonged and graphic detail that it takes what seems to be a sure-fire laugh-getter and makes it so grotesque that it kills the joke.

The ringleader behind the Ecstasy is Johnny Tapia (Jordi Molla), a Cuban drug kingpin who seems to have based his manner (and accent) on Al Pacino in "Scarface". He plans on retiring to Cuba with his billions in drug money but because American security is now so tight post-9/11, he is finding it increasingly difficult to get his money out of the country ("The rats eat my money before I can get it to Cuba!"). Mike and Marcus vow to bring him down, especially after they discover that Syd (Gabrielle Union), who is Marcus’ sister and Mike’s secret girlfriend, is actually an undercover DEA officer who is posing as Tapia’s money launderer.

Considering the fact that it comes from a pair of stars and a director whose recent efforts haven’t been all that successful with critics or audiences (Smith had "Wild Wild West", "Ali" and "Men in Black II", Bay’s last effort was the thoroughly reviled "Pearl Harbor" and Lawrence’s list of duds is too long to go into here), you might expect that they might approach a film like "Bad Boys II" (which they probably wouldn’t be doing if those previous projects had been hits) with a little bit of humility. You would be wrong because all involved come across with the self-involved swagger of those who are convinced that whatever project they are involved with is automatically the biggest, baddest and best simply because they have decided to grace it with their presence. For an idea of the staggering levels of hubris involved with this film, all you need to do is look at the running time and discover that what should, by all rights, be a 100-minute movie actually clocks in at a staggering 2 1/2 hours, of which at least an hour could have been dropped without really losing anything important. (Simply eliminating the incessant gay-bashing jokes, for example, would have shortened things considerably.)

Most of the running time is dedicated to ludicrously overscaled action set-pieces that try so hard to blow the audience away that they soon become irritating. This is the kind of film where a person shoots 100 bullets when one would have sufficed and where the sheer effort to outdo itself with each passing scene winds up exhausting both the film and viewers alike. Early on, there is an enormous car chase in which dozens of cars are crushed, buildings are smashed, half of Miami is seemingly blown up and hundreds of people are killed in an extended firefight (happily, though, we are soon informed that while many bad guys were run over, burned or cut down in a hail of gunfire, "The good news is that no cops died"). While the sequence is probably the highlight of the film (though it probably would have had more impact if it weren’t coming on the heels of the big chase scenes in "The Matrix Reloaded", "The Italian Job" and "T3"), Bay (as well as the army of writers who worked on the script-Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl get the final credits and the others get to avoid sullying their resumes) makes the mistake of trying to continuously top it with each subsequent scene but all he does is make things louder and more incoherent.

Some of his attempts to top himself are so inconceivably hideous that they almost need to be seen to be believed. There is another car chase, for example, but the gimmick this time that one of the cars involved is a fully loaded mortuary truck-inevitably, the doors fly open and bodies spill out only to be run over. Another scene features a shoot-out in a dilapidated old house that seems to exist only because Bay figured out a way to do a continuously revolving 360-degree pan throughout the gunfire (giving the effect of the camera being placed on a Lazy Susan) and wanted to use it. By the end of the film, Bay is so desperate for thrills that the story turns into a full-scale CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in order to end on a bang.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the school of cinematic excess that "Bad Boys II" desperately tries to be a part of. However, for a film as wildly overscaled as this to succeed, it has to either use its excesses in order to make a point (as Steven Spielberg did in his underrated "1941", where the over-the-top approach was meant to mirror the hysterics that the United States falls into at the slightest hint that its superiority in the world is threatened) or by having fun with its absurdities (as Michael Bay himself did in his cheerfully goofy epics "The Rock" and "Armageddon") Here, though, there is no point and no humor to be had-the excesses exist only because Bay managed to convince Sony Pictures to give him zillions of dollars and he was hell-bent on spending every single cent because he could.

When Bay isn’t going for the pyrotechnics, though, he is ladling on the gore in amounts that even hard-core action junkies might find excessive. There are the standard bloody gunshots to the head but those are some of the milder things on display here. One bit, for example, features Peter Stormare as a Russian drug dealer forced to renegotiate his position while sitting next to his former partner, who has been dismembered and stuffed in a leaky tortilla box. Even less pleasant is an extended scene in a mortuary which begins with our heroes leering over the aforementioned chesty naked corpse, proceeds to them digging inside of bodies and flinging errant kidneys around and climaxes with a skull falling away to reveal an exposed brain. I always believed that for sheer unpleasantness in an action movie context, nothing would ever top the loathsomeness of "The Last Boy Scout" (which began, you will recall, with a drug-addled football player gunning down opponents in the middle of a play) but I believe that we have a new winner.

"Bad Boys II" is smug, stupid, condescending, repulsive, woefully unfunny, ponderously long and an insult to anyone who pays good money to see it and, in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it do a quick fade at the box-office after what is sure to be a big opening weekend. Audiences, after all, will only put up with so much crap before they finally rebel and demonstrate that even the hardest sells won’t induce them into seeing a shabby bag of goods. Every once in a while, the viewing public draws a line in the sand and "Bad Boys II" winds up tripping over it.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2003 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
Peter's Archives

While the views expressed by Peter Sobczynski do not necessarily reflect the views of Criticdoctor.com, the Critic Doctor will occasionally examine Mr. Sobczynski's film reviews to bring forth an honest examination of those views expressed.