REVIEW
BAD BOYS II
Starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence and Peter Stormare
Directed by Michael Bay
Now showing
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Back when open season was declared on the overblown, painfully inane Pearl Harbor in 2001, one critic had a novel opinion. In Film Comment, Kent Jones argued that the reason Michael Bay’s piece of jingoistic war-porn was so lousy was that the director displayed uncharacteristic restraint.
Jones was right. With The Rock and Armageddon, Bay developed a hyper-aggressive style that provoked nothing less than total sensory overload. This was big-budget American action cinema at its burliest – an adrenalized blur of gunfire, squealing tires and screaming faces. His efforts made the rest of uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s stable of macho hacks – e.g., Simon West, Tony Scott and Dominic Sena – seem like pantywaists.
So what if Bay’s maximalist approach made his films so incoherent that it was often impossible to tell the characters apart or hear what they were saying or even understand why it was so important to blow up whatever it was they were blowing up? Bay’s results were as exhilarating as they were repulsive.
If Pearl Harbor was Bay’s misguided stab at respectability, then this sequel to his 1995 feature debut re-establishes his core ethos: bigger, faster, louder, harder. It may re-unite the stars of the original, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, but Bad Boys II is really all about Bay’s unrelenting compulsion to push the film into the place that Kenny Loggins once called "the danger zone."
Massaged to a passable state by Bull Durham’s Ron Shelton and Permanent Midnight author Jerry Stahl, the script concerns a Cuban drug lord in Miami who is set to become North America’s biggest distributor of ecstasy – a designer drug that, if Bad Boys II is to be believed, is used solely by skanky supermodels.
On his trail are Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Bennett (Lawrence), bickering members of the Tactical Narcotics Team. Lowrey and Bennett’s investigation methods may leave a trail of fiery wreckage throughout Miami, but their captain (Joe Pantoliano) is loath to ream them out. Instead, he uses the same new-age anger management techniques that the high-strung Bennett uses to cope with his partner’s cowboy antics. Adding friction is the fact that Lowrey’s been seeing Bennett’s sister Syd (Gabrielle Union), a DEA agent who’s also trying to take down the druglord.
Of course, all this is sidelined by the action sequences, which are as numerous as they are berserk. Bay’s innovations include a freeway chase between cops and dreadlocked Haitians who try to slow the cops by literally dropping cars (and a boat) on them. In another chase, the obstacles are human cadavers, some of which end up squashed underneath the car that Lowrey just borrowed from Dan Marino. All this is rendered in shots that last no longer than a half-second.
The finale involves several gigantic explosions, a shotgun-toting grandmother, robot cars, a Humvee driving downhill through an exploding shantytown, a minefield at Guantanamo Bay and a bona fide American invasion of Cuba. (Yes, it’s the Michael Bay of Pigs!)
Mindless, putrid, overlong and, in its own way, utterly glorious, Bad Boys II is more movie than anyone can handle. I haven’t been so stunned by a Hollywood product since Freddy Got Fingered, a film that had a similarly ballsy flair for going way beyond the endurance of its audience.
Ideally, Bad Boys II should play for one night on every movie screen on the continent. Then, to ensure the legendary status the film deserves, every print in existence should be destroyed in a purifying fire. We should probably go ahead and decapitate Michael Bay while we’re at it – that dude’s the Antichrist. |
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