Bad Boys II | Review

Summer of sequels is turning out to be quite the mess, ‘butt’ especially with this dud.

They always say read the label before making a purchase, the same should be said for this mess of a film whose contents read: Michael Bay directed and Jerry Bruckheimer produced. While my prayers to bring back the John Woo and Luc Besson of the past might go unanswered, I still hope for the next great action-flick with a funny side as in Die Hard and/or The Professional. I admit to having been caught by the preview of one car-chase, but when watching this film I got a case of take deeper breaths and wait patiently until the credits roll up.

Miami, Florida. You’d think that the warm water and fun in the sun would be enough for all the kids to enjoy. But apparently, the United States is in such dire need for club-land vitamins that they have to come up with an elaborate shore-dropping casket-filling scheme to help the demand. There to dismantle the whole Russian-Cuban operation from Amsterdam are the pair of Miami’s best. Forget about Crockett and Tubbs, here we have the African American version of foul-mouths, gold chains, nice looking villas and Ferrari cars owning cops with average minimum wage salaries.

This is the type of idiotic film where a hundred henchmen chase after one car driven by a women who has Indy-car driving experience and where the bad guys can hit every target except the four tires of the car in which they are pursing. With super-human skills inside a pair of Dumb or Dumberer candidates, we have trouble believing that the only place they can get hit is in the buttocks region. But all the cool looking swooping camera angles, can’t make up for the lack of chemistry between our two zeroes in god-awful actor Martin Lawrence (Do the Right Thing) and summer-blockbuster marquee name of Will Smith (Six Degrees of Separation). If the terrible on-screen presence isn’t enough, we have to contend with this plot, with major gear-shifting problems where Bay obviously has trouble incorporating the story mechanics of a Heat and The Fast and the Furious inside a farcical aspects of the film. Not only are we victims, but so are actors like Joe Pantoliano (Memento) and Peter Stormare (Fargo) who apparently needed some paycheck dough to fill in for their indie projects.

Bad Boys 2 has a couple of moments that could make one laugh, I liked the electronic store idiocy, but I think that I will definitely emphasize my efforts to avoid such projects where the investment money going towards pyrotechnics is larger than the investment in time to make some sort of fathomable script. There is nothing worse than seeing a film and wishing that you could have got back the two hours that you lost. Just like the Cops television show and the film’s predecessor, there is nothing more than stupid than watching cops in car chases. If I had to watch Bad Boys 2 again or drop an ecstasy, I might consider the latter option instead.

Rating 0.5 stars