Cards on the table: I did not expect to enjoy Bad Boys II as much as I did. The movie has attained this weird mythical status in the annals of action movie history, thanks in no small part to Edgar Wright giving it his seal of approval in Hot Fuzz. Before that, Bad Boys II had the stink of failure all over it. At least, that’s how this guy remembers it. But now the movie is 21 years old, and if I could buy this movie a drink, you bet your ass I would.
Pearl Harbor was a box office hit in 2001, despite reviews that raked Michael Bay over the coals for playing too fast and loose with history. That, along with America’s collective freakout over 9/11, is directly responsible for Bad Boys II, a movie that refuses to apologize for how racist, misogynistic and downright angry it is about every damn thing. This very well could be the angriest movie ever made. (It’s this or The Last Boy Scout). After Pearl Harbor, Bay needed a hit, and a long-in-the-works Bad Boys sequel just happened to be ready to roll. Wikipedia lists an astonishing 20+ screenwriters doing various drafts, rewrites and punch-ups. Most notable among them was Judd Apatow, who apparently hired Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to help him add more jokes to a film that desperately needed them. So in addition to being the most early-aughts action movie ever, it’s also got some of the most early-aughts bro-comedy hot glued onto it as well.
But despite how gleefully this movie wallows in every ounce of bad taste it can muster, Bad Boys II is a thoroughly entertaining piece of work. You’re never more than a couple minutes away from a ridiculous car chase, a brutal gunfight, or any number of scenes in which a police officer breaks a hundred rules and regulations in the name of catching his prey. In the immediate wake of 9/11, when the US government seemingly had the power to do anything it wanted with no repercussions, this movie was exhibit A that, yes, this was absolutely the case.
Eight years after Mike (Will Smith) and Marcus (Martin Lawrence) murdered a whole bunch of heroin dealers at the end of Bad Boys, the guys have been through an extensive amount of therapy. Times had changed since the mid-90s and a concerted effort was underway for men to get more in touch with their feelings. (More on this later.) Mike seems to handle that adjustment okay, but for Marcus it’s a chance to re-evaluate his entire life. Coupled with an incident where Mike accidentally shoots Marcus in the ass during a raid at a Ku Klux Klan rally, the integrity of the team is on thin ice.
The movie tells you exactly what you’re in for from the word go. The very first shot puts us right in the middle of a factory producing and packaging a hell of a lot of ecstasy, with big buff dudes loading it all into coffins and dropping them into the Miami harbor. It’s way more elaborate than the simple heroin runners of the first film, and we’re just getting started. After our guys shoot up a Klan rally (with an assist from Henry Fucking Rollins), we see them settle down for a nice dinner with Marcus’ family, including his kid sister Syd (Gabrielle Union), who’s keeping secrets from both of them. From Mike, she’s hiding her role as an undercover agent for the DEA to track down the very heroin smugglers wanted by the Miami PD. And from Marcus, Syd is hiding the fact that she’s been sleeping with Mike.
So right away, we have two siblings working in two different bureaus of law enforcement competing to see who can take down Cuban drug lord Johnny Tapia (Jordi Mollà) first. The Russian mob and Haitian Zoepounder gang also want a piece of Tapia, making this movie basically one huge gang war. And then Will Smith is stuck in the middle, hellbent on being the most dangerous human being on the planet. One of the running threads here involves Marcus re-assessing how he feels about Mike who, since the events of the first movie, has become increasingly reckless in the line of duty. Shooting potential witnesses, putting himself and Marcus in harm’s way for no good reason, costing the Miami PD hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage. If the movie had pulled the Lethal Weapon bit and given Mike a death wish, it would feel right at home here.
But instead, Mike’s recklessness manifests in one bugnuts crazy setpiece after another. The opening shootout at the Klan rally is just the warmup act. The very next action sequence is like a symphony of nonsense in four movements. First Syd gets ambushed by the Haitian gang, leading to a rooftop shootout, which soon turns into a car chase through the streets of Miami. Mike and Marcus call in Miami PD for backup and set up a police barricade, which turns the car chase into another shootout. The last remaining Zoepounder flees, causing Mike and Marcus to give chase again, this time onto the MacArthur Causeway, where the drug runner starts dropping cars off the back of a transport truck, wreaking an ungodly amount of carnage. All our heroes emerge completely unscathed, of course. Even Mike’s Ferrari looks no worse for wear.
This sequence is such a glorious piece of mayhem that I’m honestly shocked they tossed it out in the first act of the movie. Every turn ups the ante and builds on the one before, coming to a crescendo of cars crashing every which way. A strikingly similar scene became the big showstopper ending to Fast Five a few years later. In fact, you can see a direct line between the work Bay puts in here and the style Justin Lin would bring to his run of Fast & Furious movies. While everyone was busy laughing over “Bayhem” and his over indulgent tendencies, right under everyone’s noses he was laying down the template that vehicular action would follow for the next twenty years.
But this is what we came to Bad Boys II for, right? If we wanted realistic car chases or some semblance of good taste, we wouldn’t be watching a Michael Bay movie. The poor reaction to Pearl Harbor clearly made Bay rethink his priorities as a filmmaker, because he comes out guns blazing like he has something to prove. The plot is comically loose, even compared to the original, but Bay uses it to hang a string of increasingly bonkers action scenes. There’s the now iconic sequence where Mike and Marcus get into a shootout in the Zoepounder drug den, with the camera whirling around between two rooms as both sides take potshots at one another. It’s something different from Bay; he’s flexing his action muscles to the breaking point, good sense be damned.
For their part, Smith and Lawrence are on top of their game. The focus is less on Marcus this time around, which affords Smith the opportunity to take the reins, and gives Gabrielle Union plenty of room to do her own thing. (In researching this piece, I found out they made a two-season spinoff all about Union’s character called LA’s Finest. It came out fifteen years later, and marked the first foray into original programming for the Spectrum cable company, which explains why I’d never heard of it. Then again we’re a Lumos household.) But the movie picks up the tiny dangling thread from the original where Mike and Marcus kinda sheepishly say they love each other. “We ride together, we die together. Bad boys for life” is how they put it this time around.
Here, though, that gets amped up into Marcus venting his emotions to Mike in an electronics store. He’s emotional after getting shot in the ass, which he complains has made him impotent, once again putting him at odds with his wife. He lets all his feelings out to Mike, which Mike accepts, but refuses to help him work through it. Also, the two don’t realize others are watching. They’re on-camera and the manager’s bozo failson accidentally broadcasts it to every TV in the store. But because Bad Boys II considers itself an equal opportunity offender, the movie takes this as a chance to turn the whole scene into one big gay joke.
You know what they’re talking about because you’ve been watching the movie, but the good people at Circuit City? They just got here. They missed the first twenty minutes of the movie, so to them this whole thing sounds like two lovers having a spat over performance anxiety. Ha ha ha! Two grown men can love each other like brothers, but talking about their feelings makes the rest of us extremely uncomfortable!
And it makes Mike extremely uncomfortable too. He doesn’t wanna hear any of this, and dismisses Marcus’s feelings pretty blatantly, while also accidentally saying a bunch of stuff that incenses the people listening outside. If I could remove any one scene from this movie, it’s this one. The gay jokes are one thing; it was a different time and it is what it is, though still painfully unfunny. But it’s also a problem that Marcus bares his soul to Mike, and Mike just doesn’t care. That’s the mark of a true sociopath, which would be in line with Mike’s character at this point, but it still just strikes me as extremely toxic.
We move on from this pretty quickly though, to our finale, where Tapia has figured out Syd is a mole, kidnapped her and taken her to his mansion in Cuba. This is the famous “shit just got real” moment, and Captain Joey Pants has to quietly tell our guys that if they wanna go save her, they’ll have to do it alone, but that he can make a few phone calls and get the feds to secretly help em out. Y’know, because blah blah blah Patriot Act.
What follows is a sequence of events that’s easy to guess, but the degree to which it spirals out of control is still baffling. Black Ops raid on a mansion? Blow that fucker up. Downhill car chase through a shanty town? Smash every last piece of corrugated metal in Cuba. Standoff at the gates of Guantanamo? Hell yeah. I had no idea landmines were gonna figure into the finale, but sure! Fuckin’ landmines!
Despite every last shred of good taste in my body, I kinda loved this movie. There’s a lot of painful Dubya-era macho bluster going on here, but it’s easy to overlook and see how hard the movie just wants to entertain. I respect the amount of caution Bay throws to the wind here to pull off the most blisteringly nutty action movie he can. You can tell Will Smith is relishing the opportunity to do a hard-R action movie again, too. He goes full on tough guy mode here, and Bay knows exactly how to shoot him.
Bad Boys II definitely isn’t for everyone. It revels in its bad attitude and seems hellbent on being abrasive. If it were made with that ethos today, it would be the most insufferable thing ever. But 2003 really was a different world, and it looks absolutely quaint now. Time’s been good to this one.
NEXT TIME: This is where I make a Lost reference about going back…
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