"Bad Boys II" might be considered three action sequences and four comedy routines in search of a story. Failing to locate one, the film diverts to Plan B: the invasion of Cuba.
That was tried, with even less success, in 1962, not that anyone associated with "Bad Boys II" was alive then or has any passing acquaintance with history. As it plays out here, it's simply a final idiocy. In the iron logic of summer movies, filmmakers are locked into a big-bang theory. The bang at the end has got to be bigger and badder than any previous bangs, and so hot-dog director Michael Bay, who's already engineered a fabulous car chase in which Chevy Malibus drop off an auto carrier and bounce along the roadway like pumpkins to dissuade our heroes in pursuit, has to find the bigger bang. He overreaches badly.
The "Bad Boys II" script may be shot full of holes, but Will Smith and plenty of over-the-top action keep the show moving right along.
(John Bramley)
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Up till then the movie has simply been frenzy, 'tude, violence and good, clean, stupid American fun. It's actually pretty funny: Bad boy Miami cops Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) have as much rapport as they had in the original eight years ago. Much of what the two do together seems improvised, and it's always pretty amusing.
The relationship is built along Mel Gibson-Danny Glover lines: Lawrence's Marcus is a family man, nervous, trying to deal with his anger, career-conscious, conscientious, troubled. Meanwhile, Smith's Mike is a true bad boy, a wild card: He's reckless, quick-tongued, a banterer's banterer, insanely self-confident. He's always pushing out, Marcus is always pulling back. Put it another way: Mike wants to go clubbin', Marcus wants to pay the mortgage. So these two battle each other like the Bickersons across the landscape of South Florida while bullets, cars and bodies fly their way, which they barely notice because each is trying so hard to out-quip the other.
Though the film boasts 10 actual screenwriters and story authors, I suspect the script was assembled in the following way: Extra pages from "2 Fast 2 Furious" were mixed in with old scripts randomly selected from the long-sealed files of the "Miami Vice" TV show. All those pages were tossed in the air over a staircase, then collected from the bottom up. Then, just for the wacky fun of it, the climax from one of G. Gordon Liddy's unproduced screenplays was tacked on. No one ever read any of it, of course, so each day on the set was a new adventure.
The director is Michael Bay, and you have to say, this guy has chops as an action master. In his last film he blew up Pearl Harbor more thoroughly than the Japanese did, and my ears are still ringing. He blew up an asteroid in his film before that, the Zen-moron masterpiece "Armageddon," which closed on an image of Bruce Willis weeping crocodile glycerin tears as he pushed the button that blew himself and 10 billion tons of deep-space pig iron to bits before it could cue-ball the Earth into the sun. And he was the director of record on the original "Bad Boys" in 1995.
So when Bay gets revved up, there's no calming him down. It so happens that his is the third variation this summer on the somewhat arcane theme of cars-chasing-trucks-and-trucks-counterchasing-cars-on-a-freeway. The first two were in "Matrix Reloaded" (anybody remember?) and just two weeks back in "Terminator 3," but it's Bay's stroke of genius to add a fleet of rasta-men with AK-47s to the carnival of wreckage, so besides dozens of bouncing cars you have thousands of whizzing bullets. The air is alive with the sound of metal ripping.
The problem is, this sequence, staggering though it is, happens too early. There's no place left to go, and the movie still has an hour or so to run (at 21/2 hours, it's way too long, by the way). So the plot -- stop me if you've heard this one before: A scurvy yet glamorous Latin chap who shaves with a spoon is importing drugs into Miami and our boys have got to stop him, but the DEA is also on the case -- runs out of steam. Well, that's an exaggeration: Since there was no plot, there was no steam. Best to say, the plot just quits on the movie.
So what eats up the time? Comedy and gunfights. The former is by far the better time-waster. In one sequence sure to be remembered, Lawrence and Smith do a number on a poor young man who has come by to court Lawrence's daughter; Smith impersonates a somewhat incoherent ex-con, to extraordinary levels of dead-eyed craziness. In another, Lawrence, the better physical comedian, has accidentally taken two ecstasy pills and is in a different universe when they go to visit the captain (the redoubtable, ubiquitous Joe Pantoliano) to secure his backing for a subpoena. While Smith, in the foreground, tries to stay focused and professional, Lawrence, in the background, is imitating an octopus stoned on mescaline and patio sealant.
Another time-filler: subplots. But, you ask, how can there be subplots if there is no plot? I don't know the answer, only that they do it somehow in this movie. One involves Smith's attraction to Syd (Gabrielle Union), an undercover DEA agent who happens to be Lawrence's baby sister. Peter Stormare shows up at odd moments as a Russian mafia member being squeezed by the bad guys, to utterly no detectable consequence.
The movie really loses its mind in its concluding commando junket. You can stay with most of the film because it's operating in a zone of summer movie hyperbole, and it demands you trade logic for simple pleasure. Okay, that's the summer bargain. But you can't stay with this: It's simply preposterous that the Miami Police Department would invade Cuba with more firepower than the 101st Airborne hauled into Iraq. Who gave the okay? Oh, I get it: Condi Rice wasn't available, so they called Sonny Crockett and he said it was fine by him.
Bad Boys II (150 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for violence and frequent profanity.
