Movie Review: Bad Boys For Life (2020)

An action comedy buddy movie, Bad Boys For Life evolves the series towards middle age realities but still offers a rollicking ride.

In Mexico, dangerous criminal Isabel Aretas (Kate del Castillo) breaks out of prison with the help of her son Armando (Jacob Scipio). They set out to seek revenge on all those who killed Isabel's drug lord husband many years prior, with Miami Detective Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) on the hit list. Meanwhile, Mike's partner Detective Miles Burnett (Martin Lawrence) becomes a grandfather and seeks to retire from policing.

Armando shoots and seriously hurts Mike, and proceeds to assassinate others in his revenge quest. Mike recovers and is eager to investigate, but finds Miles fully retired and rejecting violence. Police captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) teams Mike with an elite investigative team headed by his ex-girlfriend Lieutenant Rita Secada (Paola Núñez), but they clash over his direct old-school methods. With Armando's killing spree not abating, Mike's anger increases, as does his determination to convince Miles to return to service.

Seventeen years after the first sequel, officers Lowrey and Burnett are back, a bit wiser and heavier, for another round of banter-laced mayhem. With their partnership now closing in on 25 years, they are men on the downside of their career, but only one of them knows it. Belgian-Moroccan co-directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (billed as simply Adil and Bilall) exploit creeping age and diverging levels of enthusiasm to maximum effect, the script (by Chris Bremner, Peter Craig and Joe Carnahan) comfortably leveraging the available star power.

Bad Boys For Life is often funny, and sometimes hilarious. Martin Lawrence embraces Burnett's non-violent domesticity, leading to some of the best comic moments. The encounter with an accountant zonked-out on drugs is a classic, Burnett attempting to penetrate his soul with heart. A dead body falling from a great height onto a Nissan Quest and a criminal with an icky growth on his forehead are also excellent.

The action scenes arrive with the required regularity, and combine quality execution with laughs. The usual car and motorcycle chases culminate with the usual stunts, and plenty of helicopters enter the fray. The final climax is excellent, Lowrey and Burnett joining forces with Rita and her eclectic crew to turn an abandoned Mexican estate into a war zone. Poignant moments punctuate the action, and while welcome, the juxtaposition of jocular action with genuine loss and soulful revelations often results in jarring tonal dissonance.

The visual style is glitzy, vivid, and deeply infused with the vibrancy of Miami and Mexico. The supporting cast is crowded with characters but surprisingly effective. In short and sharp strokes Adil and Bilall create a potent mother-son antagonist duo in Isabel and Armando, while the agents working for Rita are efficiently brought to life by Vanessa Hudgens (kick-ass), Charles Melton (wise-ass) and Alexander Ludwig (on a psychoanalytical journey to discover his true identity).

Bad Boys For Life displays courage in introducing a late but still sharp narrative twist, consistent with the plot and characters but still quite spicy. The bad boys may be grappling with the passing years, but they still pack plenty of verve.

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Movie Review: Bad Boys II (2003)

Applying the principle of go big or go home, director Michael Bay goes huge. Transforming a buddy cop movie into an outright spectacle almost 150 minutes in length, Bad Boys II is somewhat enjoyable for its sheer bravado, and outdoes the original in glitz, glamour, and extreme violence.

Large shipments of Ecstasy are being shipped into Miami. Narcotics detectives Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) are assigned to find the importer and stop the flow of drugs. After tangling with the Ku Klux Klan, the trail leads to Cuban gangster Johnny Tapia (Jordi Molla), who is establishing himself as the lord of the underworld and brutally eliminating competing criminals. Complicating matters is Sydney Burnett (Gabrielle Union), Marcus' sister and DEA agent, herself part of a separate team trying to take down Tapia.

After numerous chases and gun battles, Burnett and Lowrey achieve a breakthrough when they uncover Tapia's favoured method for transporting drugs, involving dead bodies and caskets. But Tapia won't give up his empire quietly, and he grabs a hostage and heads for the refuge of his home country, triggering a climactic mercenary raid resembling more of a military operation than police work.

Bad Boys II soars during several exhilarating, prolonged action sequences. An ultra violent car chase that starts on the street system before migrating to the freeway has bad guys commandeering a car transporter truck and using vehicles as projectiles while Burnett and Lowrey give chase in a Ferrari. Bay elevates carnage to art, and sets a new standard for adrenaline-powered wanton vehicular destruction.

A bloody shootout in the hideout of a Haitian gang achieves similar brilliance. Bay's cameras seamlessly rotate around walls, squeeze through holes in the concrete, and zoom to where the bullets are heading in a highly kinetic visual ballet of impending death, as a steady stream of banter between Burnett and Lowrey adds humorous icing to the gritty scene.

And just to add an exclamation point, the plot contrives to have a Hummer plough through an entire hillside shanty town at breakneck speed, causing all sorts of hidden drug labs to explode in the process.

As can be expected in a knowingly overblown extravaganza, many other sequences in Bad Boys II don't work nearly as well. When Burnett and Lowrey verbally abuse a teenager who arrives on Burnett's doorstep to date his daughter, the exchange quickly degenerates from comic to hurtfully cruel. Burnett suffering the consequences of inadvertently swallowing two Ecstasy pills veers into cheap slapstick.

With the tornado of non-stop action, it is a surprise that the characters are not totally short-changed. There are enough dialogue exchanges to generate some clumsy humour and awkward humanity. Will Smith hits his stride quickly as the smooth Mike Lowrey, leaving the agitation to Martin Lawrence as Marcus Burnett suffers through a full-blown crisis of purpose caused by the high likelihood that wherever Lowrey happens to be, dead bodies are sure to follow. Jordi Molla is given plenty of time to develop Johnny Tapia into an entertaining, over-the-top drug ganglord. Gabrielle Union as Burnett's sister and DEA agent Sydney places herself in the middle of the buddy relationship by romancing Lowrey and going undercover as a money launderer providing services to Tapia.

Bad Boys II is about large explosions, vivid colours, wild shoot-outs, insane stunts, high speed chases, unconstrained energy, almost gruesome violence, incessant foul language and a dash of humour. With everything louder than everything else, it delivers artistically brawny sensory overload.

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Movie Review: Bad Boys (1995)

Lots of explosions, lots of bullets, lost of car chases, lots of attempted one-liners, lots of nonsense. Ho hum.  Bad Boys is action without soul, polished enough to be tolerable but utterly and immediately forgettable.

A ruthless criminal gang breaks into a Miami police station and takes off with millions of dollars in seized heroine. It's a massive embarrassment for the good guys, and narcotics detectives Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) are called in to track down and retrieve the stolen drugs. Burnett is a family man, Lowrey is a womanising bachelor with an inherited fortune, but despite their differences they are partners and best friends.

Their investigation leads them to Julie Mott (Tea Leoni), who has witnessed the criminals enjoying the drugs and killing her friend Maxine. Burnett and Lowrey need to keep Julie safe as they track down Fouchet (Tcheky Karyo), the grim-faced, always angry leader of the bad guys.

The actors go through Bad Boys fully knowing that they are in a mindlessly gratuitous action movie, and not even pretending otherwise. People get killed, shot, battered, and bloodied, but Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as Lowrey and Burnett are too cool to care, display any emotion or pause to take stock: no, they are too busy trading insults and trying to think up the next glib comment. It is almost ironically left to Tea Leoni to inject any thoughtfulness into Bad Boys. Although her primary purpose in the movie is to wear ever shorter skirts in each successive scene, Leoni at least attempts to display some minimal fear, anger, frustration and playfulness in among the ceaseless carnage.

Bad Boys was director Michael Bay's feature film debut, and he imports his expertise in commercials and music videos to the big screen, and forgoes all other elements required to make a good movie, such as a meaningful script, human drama, acting, and polysyllabic dialogue. The reincarnation of Michael Winner with bigger budgets, Bay is all about placing the camera to get the best angle for the upcoming explosion. He washes the film with resplendent colours, making the best use of Miami and ensuring that the screen always looks gorgeous. Bad Boys is a slick two hour music video, an exercise in parking the brain and indulging the base instincts of the juvenile eye.

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