Rating: B
Dir: Michael Bay
Star: Martin Lawrence, Will Smith, Jordi Mollà, Gabrielle Union
Over the eight years since the original, Bay had been busy, making The Rock, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, leaving the relatively small-scale Bad Boys in the dust. Smith, too, had moved on up, becoming a superstar with Men in Black and Independence Day. Lawrence? I guess Big Momma’s House was a thing, for some reason entirely lost on me. Still, it was all enough to get a budget almost seven times the size of its predecessor, at a hefty $130 million, twice the price of the average studio production that year. While the leads and director certainly got a good slice of it, you’d be hard pushed to claim the money is not up there on the screen.
Once again, Miami is being threatened by foreigners and drugs. In this case, it’s Cuban gangster Johnny Tapia (Mollà), who’s importing huge quantities of Ecstacy and distributing both it and the resulting cash, sewn into corpses. It’s up to narcotics department detectives Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Smith) to stem the tide. Also involved is Marcus’s sister, Sydney (Union), who is infiltrating Tapia’s gang as a DEA agent, while dating Lowrey, unbeknownst to her brother. It all ends with her kidnapped and taken off to Cuba by Tapia. With the government moving at a glacial pace to achieve her release, it’s up to our heroes, along with a cadre of anti-Castro locals and some Latino colleagues, to storm Tapia’s compound and rescue Sydney.
Before we arrive there though, we get what’s some of the finest vehicular mayhem ever committed to screen. I refer, in particular, to the freeway chase which sees Haitian thugs chasing after Sydney in a car-transporter – clearly the optimum pursuit vehicle. Marcus and Mike are hotly pursuing in the latter’s Ferrari, with a slew of others present to act as the automotive equivalents of red shirts on Star Trek. Especially when the Haitians start dropping cars off the back of the transporter. It’s the kind of gloriously, largely physical carnage we may never see again, in these days of pixel manipulation [While Fury Road went somewhere similar, its post-apocalyptic setting provided a sense of distance] I’d not argue if you said the sequence is the pinnacle of Bay’s career.
It’s certainly the pinnacle here, though the rest still entertains, Smith and Lawrence still playing off each other well. The mortuary “sneak and peek” stands out, like its corpse tits, as does the duo’s savage verbal beatdown of a potential boyfriend for Marcus’s daughter. This famously caused Roger Ebert to ask, in his one-star review, whether the film-makers have “so lost touch with human nature that they think audiences will like this scene?” Which just tells me, Ebert never had a teenage daughter. It is fair to say that 147 minutes is too long for the movie, with some scenes serving little purpose. I remain hard-pressed to argue this is other than a very good use of $130m. But is it true that there’s a point on a man’s head, where if you shoot it, it will blow up?