This summer, I’ve decided to punish myself by watching and reviewing every single Michael Bay movie.
Bad Boys finds first-time director Michael Bay emerging fully formed out of the MTV content farm. The film has everything we would come to expect from Bay: Oversized explosions, Sociopathic tough guys, and a fairly icky relationship with women. But Bay wasn’t the sole architect of this house. It comes from the Jerry Bruckheimer school of filmmaking, where more is more, and there’s never a shortage of testosterone to keep the thing moving. It also comes from the comic sensibilities of stars Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, who wound up having to improvise a large chunk of the finished film, which often comes across like a beefed-up, high-octane sitcom.
Thirty years ago, Martin and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were among the top-rated sitcoms of the era. They made household names out of Lawrence and Smith, a standup comic and a rapper, respectively. In 1995, both shows were nominated for the Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite TV Show (they lost to Home Improvement). I dunno how many kids were actually watching Martin in 1995, but I was definitely one of them. The shows were considered flagship sitcoms for their respective networks, so pairing their stars together for a movie, even a hard-R action spectacular, seemed like an event.
It almost didn’t happen, of course. Everyone knows the story of how Bad Boys was originally conceived as a buddy cop movie for SNL alumni Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz. A fateful trip to Las Vegas with producer Don Simpson was all the convincing Carvey needed to realize he wanted no part of it. The script bounced around studios until it landed at Columbia Pictures, where Simpson and producing partner Jerry Bruckheimer retooled the film for Martin Lawrence.
It was Lawrence who eventually talked Will Smith into taking the part of Mike Lowery, a role originally offered to Arsenio Hall. This, of course, seems completely backwards today. Everyone thinks of Bad Boys as the first of many action classics from Will Smith, but the film very much belonged to Martin Lawrence. He’s all over this thing, and most of the film is built around the sitcom premise of Lawrence balancing his job at the Miami PD with his home life as a devoted husband and father. The film went into production without a finished script, so it was up to Lawrence, Smith and Bay to work out the dialogue for any given scene. That the movie is coherent at all is a minor miracle.
Bad Boys has a couple different plot threads holding it together. First there’s the mismatched buddy cop dynamic. Marcus (Lawrence) is the settled down family man, trying to juggle his workload with his family life. Meanwhile, Mike (Smith) is a serial playboy whose lifestyle seems great but clearly leaves him feeling empty inside. There’s also a race against the clock, as Marcus and Mike are tasked with finding out who broke into Miami PD headquarters and stole $100 million of seized heroin. Internal Affairs wants to hold them responsible, and their captain (Joe Pantoliano) screams at them to clear the department’s name before drug kingpin Fouchet (Tchéky Karyo) can sell it all and get away scot free. These threads collide with the appearance of Julie (Tea Leoni), an escort who witnessed Fouchet commit murder.
Julie seeks Mike’s help, but in another twist ripped straight out of a sitcom, she winds up with Marcus, who now has to pretend to be Mike. We’re then treated to half a dozen scenes where Martin Lawrence does a Will Smith impression in front of Tea Leoni. This must have been funnier on the page, because Lawrence gives up on the impression pretty quick. Julie nearly figures it out when she sees dozens of photos of Mike all over his apartment, but instead she just assumes Marcus (who she thinks is Mike) is in love with Mike (who she thinks is Marcus). And the flipside of this story arc is that Mike has to go live with Marcus’s family and lie to her about why, which of course causes Marcus to become paranoid that Mike might put the moves on his wife. Like I said, sitcom shit.
There’s just plain too much of this stuff, and I can’t decide if it’s a holdover from when the movie was more of a comedy, or if they’re just leaning into Lawrence and Smith both being Mr. Sitcom. The murder/drug smuggling plot isn’t that complicated, but watching these two goofuses fail upwards in their attempt to protect their witness is at least pretty entertaining. The movie is at its best when Michael Bay gets to cut loose and flex his action muscles. The scene where Fouchet finally captures Julie, forcing Mike and Marcus to give chase is the iconic setpiece of the film, making Michael Bay and Will Smith stars of the genre on the spot.
A lot of people like to cite John Woo as an influence on Bay’s style, but I see him more as a Tony Scott guy. Like with Bruckheimer, more is more. You can never move the camera or cut away too fast, and the color grading needs to reflect how sweaty and desperate every single character is. That’s The Last Boy Scout, that’s Days of Thunder, and that’s 100% Bad Boys. The South Miami haze becomes a character unto itself. That opening shot of the airplane flying over the word MIAMI in big block letters with that grimy orange tint ought to tell you exactly what kind of movie you’re in for. There are lots of close-ups emphasizing how strung out and irritated our heroes are ninety percent of the time. Bad Boys is the epitome of the blazing hot summer blockbuster that would soon make Will Smith the reigning king of summer.
Taken as a whole, Bad Boys is solid. Lawrence and Smith are a natural fit as a buddy cop team, and the utter drama with which Michael Bay stages his action setpieces is gloriously over the top. That final shootout that becomes a car chase on an airport runway is aces all around. The sitcom trappings that string us along until we get there? Not so much.
One positive thing I’ll say for this film is that it has (at least in my opinion) managed to reclaim reggae band Inner Circle’s “Bad Boys” from Fox TV’s long-running reality series COPS. That show used “Bad Boys” as a warning to anyone dumb enough to commit a crime near a TV camera. But Bad Boys turns the song on its ear and makes its heroes the bad boys (of police work). I’m pretty sure the decision to name the film after the song was made during reshoots, as the scene where Smith and Lawrence sing the song “Bad Boys” is one of many scenes that happen to be set in the same car. That one decision somehow led to a franchise that’s still running today, and a steady stream of income for Inner Circle for the past 30 years. Not bad, guys. Not bad at all.
At a minute shy of two hours, this is Michael Bay’s shortest film. As I type those words, a chill runs down my spine. I realize I’m cursing myself to a summer of fifteen films, all running between two and three hours long. And five of those films are going to involve Transformers. Oh well, whatcha gonna do?
UP NEXT: A movie that is now impossible to Google because of Dwayne Johnson.
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