Starring: Will Smith and Martin Lawrence
Director: Michael Bay
Rated: MA15+
I HAVE a confession to make. I was looking forward to Bad Boys II.
When the original Bad Boys appeared, I was deep in a phase where I believed good cinema only came with subtitles. And while I cannot now remember why I went to see it, I remember being dazzled by the film’s ethos of pure entertainment.
Bad Boys was fun. It was exciting. It made me forget subtitles.
Unfortunately, the sequel, Bad Boys II, is not fun. Nor is it exciting. It is loud, chaotic and mostly incoherent.
Director Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor) seems unconcerned there be any story at all between the impossible car chases, excessive explosions and slow motion, blood-spurting gun battles.
The stale, formulaic attempts at witty banter between Smith and Lawrence stand in where a plot should be. Similarly, caricatures stand in for actual villains. And a very predictable love(less) story between Smith and Gabrielle Union is supposed to keep us involved.
If you are impressed with cars flipping over at high speed and machine gun fire ripping through dry wall, you’ll be happy with the action in Bad Boys II. Me? I’m going back to the subtitles.
