Review: Bad Boys 2

There’s a good argument to be made that Bad Boys 2 is the most Michael Bay film he’s ever made, I still maintain that The Rock is his best film, but to include all the classic Bayisms, for better or worse, Bad Boys 2 takes the prize. It’s crass, it’s too long, it’s stupid, it’s violent.

But fuck me it’s kinda fun.

Set eight years after the first, Miami PD partners Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowry are tipped off about a massive flow of ecstasy coming into Miami but their tip leads to a dead-end, with little to go on, both of them are tasked with finding the distributor or facing disciplinary charges. Things get complicated when Marcus’ DEA agent sister Syd – who is secretly dating Mike behind Marcus’ back – gets put undercover on the task force taking down Johnny Tapier, a Cuban drug lord who’s the supplier Mike and Marcus are looking for.

Having to take every little lead they can follow, Mike and Marcus face a gruelling few days dealing with dismembered corpses, humping rats, drugs stashed in corpses and big titty dead women, all in the name of law and order.

That might not sound like much and in truth it’s not, the story isn’t the most original in the world but unlike the original film, it doesn’t feel like sitcom episode from the 70s. It’s your simple cop film style of following clues to the next set-piece but there’s nothing wholly wrong with that, especially for the type of film this is, and while it does go on a little too long the formula does work, you can see the through-line that connects everything together so I’ll give it some props for that. You hear all the time about “Turn your brain off” films which this absolutely is, but credit where it’s due, they didn’t skimp totally on the logic.

Acting once again fell to Smith and Lawrence who carried the whole film but the supporting cast weren’t terrible, the villain Johnny Tapia was fairly forgettable but at least was better than the last French guy. Johnny’s violent outbursts are commonplace amongst action movie villains but they did lead to some funny moments, the scene where he kills a bodyguard and tells his mother it was a suicide while still holding the gun springs to mind, and the couple scenes he had with his daughter did give him a little bit more character. He served a purpose and was suitably bad, not great but not terrible either.

Gabriela Union takes on the main female role as Syd Barnett, I didn’t mind Syd, she played it a little bit too straight-edged which definitely came off flatter than it should’ve been compared to the insanity surrounding her. But she had least had some agency, being undercover with the DEA and putting herself directly into the lion’s den are some ballsy decisions, and she wasn’t making stupid fucking decisions like Julie so an improvement on that front. I don’t think the relationship between her and Mike was necessary, if anything it just took away from them both as characters, but as her own character, she was alright.

There were some fun smaller roles as well, including an early role for Michael Shannon as a KKK member forced to work with Mike and Marcus for information, Peter Stormare plays Russian club owner Alexei, a fairly small role but Stormare is always fun to see and he made the part memorable. And Joey Pants (I know his name is Joe Pantoliano but I’m not looking up how to spell that every time) returns as Captain Howard, still as angry as ever but trying to calm down using the company wide ‘Woosa’ technique – spoiler alert, it doesn’t work. But as I said earlier, it’s Smith and Lawrence who carry the film and they’re just as good together as last time, arguably better.

Lawrence as Marcus is still hysterical, clueless and terrified and after eight years of this shit he’s looking to pack it in, move on from Mike and hope to stop getting shot in the ass. There’s a definite sense of Marcus just being absolutely done with everything, and the longer this case goes on the worse it gets for him, and as cruel as it sounds to laugh about watching a man lose his nerve, it is actually kinda funny. The amount of stress piling up on Marcus is immense and it leads to some good arguments between him and Mike about how fucked up their lives have gotten, I liked Marcus here and aside from a needlessly extended scene of him accidentally taking ecstasy that never really hit the mark, I found him enjoyable to watch here.

Likewise Smith as Mike is still ice-cool, even more so with Smith basically at the height of his fame when this came out. They touched upon Mike’s charisma a few times but what I found funnier here was how they highlighted Mike’s bad habit of killing suspects, often holding the case back because he’s fighting for his life and puts himself into situations where its kill or be killed, which while understandable does add to the stress on Marcus. It’s the dichotomy between the two that makes Mike and Marcus so much fun to watch, Smith has this effortless cool about him that Michael Bay knows how to capture and Lawrence is at his best when confused and scared and he’s consistently put into situations where he’s confused and scared.

Speaking of Michael Bay, by this point in his career Bay has found his footing and he lets himself fucking loose, the change from the first film is drastic but not always in the best way. I meant what I said when this is the most Michael Bay film ever and that includes the parts that people shit on him for, most notably the juvenility and gross sexualisation, the club scene when we’re introduced to Alexei has countless women all drunk and sweat-covered, taking ecstasy and making out with everyone, all the whole the camera is fixed on a low angle, looking up the short skirts of everyone around them. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad – it’s suppose to so the appeal of ecstasy and to the film’s credit the overdose a few minutes later does show the darker side well – but combined that with Syd’s whole wardrobe having a V-Neck down to her belly button and the scene with the Corpse Boobs which end up getting an extreme close-up as they jiggle on the gurney and you can’t help but feel a little grossed out.

The same goes for the juvenile humour, I don’t mind juvenile humour – a good kick in the nuts is still funny no matter what age you are – but Bay toes the line a little too finely here. The humping rats were nothing more than a distraction, the scene in the video-store where everyone overhears Mike and Marcus’ conversation and mistake it for two gay lovers having a quarrel is a little iffy, especially nowadays where the mistakenly gay trope has been pushed to the sidelines for a reason and the aforementioned Marcus on ecstasy scene serves no purpose but to extend the film another five minutes while Martin Lawrence talks about his erection. None of this is to say the film isn’t funny, I did chuckle a couple times at the banter between Mike and Marcus, but as a whole it has some issues.

Where Bay shines though is in the action, and I’ll admit it, the action is pretty fucking good here, hell it’s great even, within the first half-hour we have a scene where Syd’s undercover vehicle is highjacked leading to a car chase goes into a shootout in the middle of a Miami crossroads that then goes into another car chase against a car carrier trailer where the bad guys drop cars onto the fucking freeway and somehow get a goddamn boat involved as well. It’s one of the best examples of escalations I’ve seen in a while and the mayhem that early on in the film gets you excited to see what’s next.

Sadly that early car chase is the best action scene of the film but that doesn’t mean the rest don’t get it a shot, not long afterwards Mike and Marcus find themselves in Haitian gang territory and the shootout that ensues is improved by Bay spinning the camera 360 degrees through the doors that separate Mike and the Haitians, showing how Mike is tricking them into thinking he’s at either side, rather than right in the middle where they can shoot at him through the wall. Another car chase about halfway through wasn’t as exciting but it lead to a shootout in the middle of an office building, it’s here where things get a little too crazy and hard to follow but once it leads to a foot chase onto a tram system and the violent way it ends is pretty funny.

It was during the finale in Cuba that it realised why I was enjoying this action so much more than any of the Transformers films, this isn’t a CGI Fuck-Fest, you’re really watching a mansion explode, you’re really watching Mike drive a Hummer through a shanty-town and really watching those home shatter from the impact, all the while the camera is stuck onto the car to get as close to the action as possible. It’s that true blue practicality that makes the film that much more fun, everything has weight, everything is unpredictable, everything has impact and you feel that watching this film. Having been forced – by myself – to watch all the Transformers films, it’s nice to look back on a part in Bay’s career when he actually gave a shit.

To paraphrase what I said at the start, Bad Boy 2 is fucking ridiculous, it’s two and a half hour runtime could have easily been cut down, it’s grossly sexual, it’s excessively violent, it’s childish in its humour and insane in its destruction. But goddamn it, I had fun, this is the original “Turn your brain off” film and it set the standard for films where you can just enjoy the film for what it’s offering. Yes it’s flawed, sometimes very much so, and it deserves to be reprimanded for that, but if you’re willing to overlook that or if you just don’t care, there’s a good time to be had here.

7/10