Just what was it that Bay / Bruckheimer thought it was about Bad Boys that made it a success and that they needed to replicate in the sequel? The original was silly and littered with light-touch misogyny, but was silly fun and had nothing of the overt crassness and desperation of part 2. Never was a film more in need of an editor - or even someone ready to point out that some things simply aren't funny. An animatronic pair of rats having sex - not funny. A scene where dead bodies tumble out of a coroner's van and get run over - not funny. Martin Lawrence accidentally takes Ecstasy - funny for 1 minute, not funny after 5!
In a normal review I might apologise for having skipped on too far at this point. How about a quick overview of the plot? What even is Bad Boys 2? Well this isn't a normal review. Bad Boys 2 only has a plot in the same way that Russian dashcam footage on youtube has a 'plot' - you're just waiting for the next crash. Imagine everything that's wrong with society, every prurient politician who turns out to be a sex pest, every preacher who is revealed as a kiddy-fiddler, every union official on the take from organised crime, every Daily Express article lambasting the crass sexualisation of youth that shares the same front page as a photo expose of the newest youngest 16 year old starlet, every article in The Sun demonising immigrants and at the same time asking why football fans are racists. All of that. Imagine all of that distilled into 150 minutes of film. That is Bad Boys 2. It's encapsulated by a long montage near the start - probably intended to show us that drugs are bad (the bad guy is a drug king pin). The montage takes us through a neon & florescent lit night club. The guys and the girls are drinking, popping pills and having a great time. The camera tracks and pans around dozens of party-goers, up-skirting all the girls and moving with the beat. The montage then ends on one guy who appears to be over-dosing, and is thrown out on to the streets. This is Daily Mail moralising; happy to titillate its readers with the saucy details and take their money for the privilege, but then ending on a moral downturn, expecting everyone to believe that the message is "drugs are bad" and claiming to not understand when some of its readers took them seriously. With this one montage Michael Bay did more than some of his contemporaries will do in their entire careers to capture the hypocritical pseudo-morality of our age. If only it was done with any satire. Sadly Bay is playing it entirely for the titillation. Bollocks to him, and bollocks to his film.
At 2 hours and 30 minutes, even the glimmers of hope (and they do exist) are overshadowed by the running time and the relentless drive to turn the dial on every action scene up to 11. The film ends with what should be a breathtaking pinnacle, as Smith and Lawrence are chased in Humvees through a Cuban shanty town. It looks like the production crew built a shanty town on a hillside and drive a load of cars through it, set off a bunch of explosions and trashed the whole thing. This probably cost an enourmous amount of money, time and manpower to produce. But rather than allow the stunts space to breathe on screen, we are treated to a series of jarring cuts that make this indistinguishable from the half dozen other cgi & effects-driven chases earlier in the movie. Even when the film has the potential to be good, Bay doesn't seem to realise it and just fucks it up.
The one upside? I now understand more of the references in Hot Fuzz.
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