Directed by the returning directing team Adil Bilall, this latest entry in Jerry Bruckheimer’s high-octane action-comedy series, starting nearly 30 years ago, delivers the goods.
At one point in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, one of the leads exclaims: ‘This is some dysfunctional shit!’ With that kind of meta arthouse commentary, who needs critics? Not that reviews will matter to the genuine affection of viewers for the action-comedy buddy cop series that started three decades ago and whose lineage goes deep into 1974 (Freebie and the Bean and Busting; cite the others, if you want). It’s a format that works, even if this fourth entry is a little stretched.
Seeing Will Smith’s Mike and Martin Lawrence’s Marcus go through their trademark bickering routines is like spending an evening with a long-married couple whose constant jibes have got downright boring. At the beginning, when Mike calls Marcus a junk-food junkie, you think: Not again.
His worry is disturbingly prescient, as only a few months later, while going crazy from dancing at Mike’s wedding, Marcus suffers a heart attack. He has a near-death experience in a surreal, cosmic sequence that can only be described as a 2001: A Space Odyssey outtake, in which the now-dead Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) assures him: ‘It’s not your time.’ An entirely recuperated Marcus wakes up in the hospital, tears out his IVs, and then teeters on the ledge of the building’s roof, ranting floral space-age nonsense that would make a regular of Oprah’s shame-pit Marianne Williamson blush – not to mention his ass exposed to all of Miami.
Marcus’ newfound piety is the film’s big joke, indeed its only gag, but to say that it wears thin quickly is an understatement. During the entire film, Marcus is a gibbering fool; at one point, he thinks he can stare down the evil gator in front of him with his willpower. And Mike, predictably, starts panicking, which means that the film’s second most annoying plot strand is panic attacks.
Lots of those going around: indeed virtually the entire plot of Chris Bremner and Will Beall’s screenplay, which involves the pair working to clear Howard’s name of posthumous corruption charges – not just because they’re his friends, but because he had made a video for them (recorded before he was murdered, naturally) that must be played in the event of his death.
This also allows for Pantoliano’s popular character to come roaring back to life, albeit a bridge too far for the film’s makers to also turn him into the equivalent of Obi-Wan Kenobi — fuzzily photographed cameos dropping pearls of beneficent advice like a streetwise Dalai Lama.
Their work is made even more difficult for them when they come under suspicion of being crooks themselves (for complicated reasons), and go into hiding with Armando (Jacob Scipio, here as he was in the previous film, fresh out of jail for killing Howard but now good as gold).
This is a common feature of franchises such as this and the Fast ÂFurious series, in which ne’er-do-wells can switch from bad to good from one film to the next, and where, to add a twist to the twist, a key protagonist will – spoiler alert – turn out to be the Real Bad Guy (he or she usually wears a suit). A development common to any series is the creeping number of characters in each successive film (this one feels like it’s on spreadsheets).
Many of the cast from the first movie reprise their roles, including Vanessa Hudgens and Alexander Ludwig as coworkers of Mike and Marcus who apparently are in between delinquencies, now hilariously romantically linked to one another. There’s also an extended cameo featuring Tiffany Haddish, but she’s demonstrated in the film that she’s no uppity nigger, and gets to let her freak flag fly in a way no White character could ever hope to.
The three escapees are stalked by every thug in Miami after the top bad guy (the low-key tough guy Eric Dane, whose villainness is announced by his perfect bone structure) puts a $5 million price on their heads.
Trailing the pair is the daughter of the murdered Captain Howard (now a US Marshal), intent on revenge on Armando for killing her father. She is played by Rhea Seehorn, who doesn’t get so much as a mention in the film’s press notes, despite being – by this viewer’s opinion anyway – its finest actor. The cursed thing continues the depressing trend for singly and uniquely talented actors making the jump to one-dimensional A-list cinema after finding fame on the small screen her work on Better Call Saul is so much more engaging Considering the film’s all-star casting, her performance here is unexceptional, unfortunately.
All of which is an excuse for a lot of high-energy action sequences directed by the returning directors Adil ＆ Bilall (as Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah are billed, evidently) who appear to have tried their hand at every technical gimmick they could think of. They must have sold their drones to their nearest competitor, because they’re used so frequently, both on-screen and off, that you start to get motion sickness from all the swooping and swirling overhead shots.
For their part, the directors seem fond of body cameras too, so you get the visceral feel of the action, just like a video game (no joke intended like that, I promise). The effect looks odd rather than immersive: a scene, involving Smith tossing a gun with an attached camera to Lawrence, is clearly supposed to be a virtuosic flourish, but it just looks dumb. Panicked close-ups, applied here with an excess of the requisite grating energy, are also a motif. The actors’ nose hairs might as well be numbered.
This isn’t to say the movie lacks thrilling set-pieces — a car chase and a fight aboard a crashing helicopter are both as good as the best of the Mission: Impossible films. The single best scene features the pair as mere spectators, with the two of them helplessly looking at video monitors as Marcus’ son-in-law Reggie (played by Dennis McDonald) has become a beefy Marine, and handily dispatches more than a dozen bad guys who’ve invaded Marcus’ house.
Greatly choreographed, hyperviolent madness, leavened by Smith and Lawrence’s reactions, serves as a tantalising scrim Josh Brolin has to burn through in pursuit of some Amber Heard drugs. that ought to be the LA of Bad Boys 3. It could have been as hot as the first one – in all of its unbearable, amusing, undeniable warmth.
