Film
Bad Boys
- Director
- Michael Bay
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 115 mins
Uptight, married Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and his smooth, priapic partner Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) are the obligatory pair of mismatched Miami cops who’ve just pulled off the biggest heroin bust in history. Unfortunately, some even bigger bad guys have just broken into the cop shop and liberated all the smack back out onto the streets. With Internal Affairs on their streetwise asses, not unreasonably suspecting an inside job, the Bad Boys have just four days to banter, bond, recover the drugs, and blow up some hardware. A Whore with a Heart of Gold helps them out by accepting an assignment with a wealthy client who’s dancing unsteadily with Mr. Brownstone, but she promptly gets wasted (and not in a good way). Her pal Julie (Tea Leoni) escapes and agrees to become a material witness, though she’s speak only to Mike, who’s out pursuing scumbags. So – high concept ahoy! – Marcus pretends to be Mike and is ludicrously obliged to spend the rest of the film feigning studly behaviour, much to his wife’s displeasure, for the sake of the case, while Mike has to go and live in Marcus’s house and do the stable parent thing.
Back in 1995 Michael Bay‘s Bad Boys earned its place in movie history by proving that you could have a hit buddy movie with two black stars rather than the more familiar black/white combo. What’s more, neither Will Smith nor Martin Lawrence were known for anything other than their TV work at the time. Alas, despite all this ground-breaking, the script is rather lame. The lifeswap device could just about stand being spun out to a half-hour sitcom, but is a monumentally feeble basis for an action-bloated big-screen thriller that already expects its audience to swallow an awful lot of contrivance. The main incidental pleasure is in the cop buddies’ inability to express themselves in any way other than increasingly mixed scatological metaphor. Exhibit A: “He’s trying to crawl right up inside my ass and pin something on me!”
It’s back on screen in Come the Revolution’s No B/S series, which celebrates black comedy as part of the BFI’s Comedy Genius season.
is needed now More than ever
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