Bad Boys 2 (July 16/03)
Michael Bay's made a career out of excess, and it's generally served him well. With the exception of his last film, the misguided but generally underrated Pearl Harbor, Bay seems to know exactly what audiences want and he's more than happy to deliver. But with Bad Boys 2, he's gone too far; the film, which runs close to 150 minutes, feels like a rough cut rather than a finished product. There are so many sequences in the movie that feel as though they could've either been seriously edited down or even eliminated altogether, so it seems fairly clear that Bay had some kind of final cut clause in his contract. As a result, Bad Boys 2 is an occasionally entertaining but ultimately overlong and bloated summer action movie.
Not helping matters is the fact that there isn't really enough plot here to sustain a two-and-a-half-hour movie. The film opens with detectives Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) going undercover as Ku Klux Klan members to expose a potential ecstasy smuggling ring. But this being a sequel to Bad Boys, it's not long before the two cops find themselves in a gunfight with a dozen heavily-armed rednecks. It goes without saying that Mike and Marcus emerge victorious, but the bust only netted two bags of ecstasy (a source of embarrassment, since it was Mike's tip that led them to the Klan rally). As it turns out, a ruthless drug dealer named Johnny Tapia (Jordi Molla) is controlling the ecstasy flow in Miami, along with a shady Russian businessman (Peter Stormare). But when Tapia makes things personal by kidnapping Marcus' DEA sister, Sydney (Gabrielle Union), the bad boys get ready to stop him once and for all.
Bad Boys 2 contains all the requisite ingredients for a big summer movie, including charismatic stars and a lot of action, but the film is hindered by Bay's relentless direction (complaining about Bay's hyper-kinetic style is essentially moot, but he's particularly over-stimulated here) and the aforementioned outrageous running time. For a while there, though, the movie is surprisingly entertaining; Smith and Lawrence have real chemistry together, and the script (penned by Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl) manages a nice balance of comedy and action. There's a great car chase in the first hour that almost makes the entire movie worth checking out, as Marcus and Mike go after a group of baddies in a Ferrari on a crowded highway. That sequence was exciting and well done, and the same can be said of a few other action set-pieces in the film's first half. It's also worth noting that the movie is surprisingly violent, especially in this day-and-age when most films are edited down from an R-rating to appeal to a wider audience. Characters are bloodily shot in the head, corpses are used for speed bumps; Bay seems out to prove that today's audiences are primed for films that don't cut away every time someone gets killed.
And like the original, Bad Boys 2 relies just as heavily on humor as it does on thrills, and there are a few genuinely funny moments interspersed among the action. The most obvious example of this is a sequence that finds a young man attempting to pick up Marcus' daughter for a date, but scared out of his wits when Mike and Marcus answer the door as hardcore gang-bangers. That was funny stuff, and the same can be said of a few other moments - all of which are found in the first half of the film. It's around the midway point that Bad Boys 2 starts to become an exercise in patience more than anything else, as the repetitive nature of the film becomes a lot more noticeable: Marcus and Mike fight, go after bad guys, get chewed out by their captain (Joe Pantoliano, reprising his role from the original and stealing every single one of his scenes), and start fighting again. Even the action becomes tiresome after a while; that aforementioned car chase was certainly more than enough for one movie, but Bay throws in another long car chase (which even winds up ripping off Jackie Chan's Police Story) which is admittedly well-executed but enough is enough. Even Bay's much-maligned Pearl Harbor never felt this long, and that's really saying something.
As far as summer entertainment goes, you could probably do worse than Bad Boys 2. But had Bay submitted his film to test screenings (which I'm certain he didn't), there's no doubt it would be a heck of a lot better than it is. As it stands, it's mindless and loud - the only two ingredients a lot of folks seem to look for in big-budget flicks.
