BAD BOYS
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Annoyingly unentertaining, obvious and paper-thin buddy/cop/drug/sexy-witness movie. Presence of director Michael Bay shows none of the talent he demonstrated in THE ROCK.
I've seen this movie already, I said, as I looked at the box art. No, I haven't even seen a trailer for the movie; I don't even know what it's about, but I can look at the way they're promoting it, and I know I've seen it already.
I thought: It's about these two cops. And they're buddies, sort of. They're at each other's throats a lot, but they really do like each other. And everyone else in their department hates them 'cause they're hot-shots. And they have some kind of diametric opposition in their relationship. And one day they're in the middle of cop business as usual when they get mixed up in this plot that involves a really sadistic bad guy with lots of henchmen who can never hit anything with the billions of rounds of ammo they are always carrying. And the bad guy is a drug lord. And there's a witness, and she's this sexy thing who rubs both of them the wrong way. And their supervisor wants their badges for breakfast when they blow up half the town bringing this guy down.
I only missed the bit about the badges. The rest I got dead-on. And I hadn't even left the video store yet.
The cops in this movie are Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and the bad guy is the immensely underutilized Tcheky Karyo. Smith plays a cop who has a trust fund and is thus not a cop for the money; Martin L. is a family man (shades of the now-tired LETHAL WEAPON dynamic here) whose wife and he are at total odds. This leads to some strained scenes about Lawrence's "not getting any", and some totally unneccesary bits with him skulking around his own house, thinking his partner is now his wife's "back door man". Not funny; tiresome.
BAD BOYS gets some of its incredibly meager selling points from the presence of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Will Smith is a natural, and I'm happy to see him in movies like SIX DEGREES... and MEN IN BLACK. He's funny and charming without trying to be; he really does seem to be enjoying himself. Martin Lawrence is a different story; he's so uptight and verbally constipated that sitting through his improvised riffs are a trial.
Movies like this are not about originality. I know this. They are about style and energy and synergy between actors. I know this, too. And yet, while watching BAD BOYS, which its glamorous photography and impossibly exact stunt choreography, I felt fed up. I'd seen CON AIR, which despite being completely implausible, was still great fun, because it tried however feebly to put some new life into the mix. BAD BOYS is a dry run -- and overlong, too, clocking in at just over two hours with a lot more by-play than I felt could be justified.
I could write this movie. You could write this movie. Many people have. Many people will continue to write this movie, over and over again. Other people will buy it from them, and make it, and we will pay money to see it. More the fools we all.
In a terrifyingly prescient line from his book A SCANNER DARKLY, Phil K. Dick once mused that the McDonaldburger (as he called it) would eventually eclipse money as the token of cultural and financial exchange. One day we will all just sit in our living rooms and sell the same burger back and forth to each other. The same could be said about this movie. I have the sinking feeling we're going to see it again. Soon.
One and a half out of four Really Big Guns (tm).
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