Bad Boys II
Even after disliking both “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor,” Michael Bay still had me interested in his work. I think “Bad Boys II” was probably where it started to really sink in that ultimately, Bay was a filmmaker I was going to dislike more than like. I had enjoyed the first “Bad Boys,” but had not really thought much about it before the sequel came out in 2003. Rewatching both of them back-to-back in lead-up to the third film in the series, the gulf between the two in terms of quality still feels far, but not as far as I once thought.
I think this was the film that first took the idea of “Bayhem” to heart. After he tried to get super serious and meaningful in both “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor,” it’s like he took a step back, and said “fuck it,” and turned in his most deliriously insane movie to date. I didn’t like it in 2003, and I don’t really like it now, but it’s hard not to appreciate how wonderfully crazy this film is, at times. Focused it is not, though; there is no reason this had to be 2 1/2 hours, and I cannot imagine what an argument in favor of that choice would look like.
Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) are still Miami PD, and still taking to the streets in their absurd fashion- when we first meet them, they are in on a drug bust infiltrating a Klan rally- even though Marcus has taken to therapy with all the chaos that he and Mike get involved in, so much so that he’s putting in for a transfer. He’s got his family to think about, and more so right now since his sister, Syd (Gabrielle Union), is in town, supposedly on vacation; she is DEA, and her and Mike had a thing going on when he went to New York recently. The drug bust is for a massive shipment of Ecstacy coming in from Cuban drug lord ‘Johnny’ Tapia (Jordi Mollà), whose local dealer is Alexei (Peter Stormare), who’s nuts in that singularly Peter Stormare way. I think that’s all the plot you need.
I’m glad that I finally rewatched this one, because the film has taken on a mythic status with action junkies, and Bay fans, as being a key part of the Michael Bay puzzle, with its namecheck in Edgar Wright’s “Hot Fuzz” being part of the reason. I get why; this film has Bay firing on his most stylish, and needlessly reckless, cylinders in a way that shows a finesse of the “style” he was building up to before this film, and would basically remain in for every film after, even something like his next “serious” movie, the Benghazi thriller, “13 Hours.” The action is nutty and ridiculously staged, with individual shots (the slo-mo shot following the bullet at the beginning, the ludicrous car chase where cars are used as weapons, the 360-degree shots in a shoot-out, and the closing sequence in Tapia’s Cuban mansion) often overshadowing the overlong action scenes. With such a thin storyline, and barely any emotional connection with the character “arcs,” such as they are, the flash of Bay’s action can only take us so far. I did like it more than I did back in 2003, but I’m interested in seeing what new filmmakers bring to the franchise with the third one.
