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Bad Boys II review
:. Director: Michael Bay
:. Starring: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence
:. Running Time: 2:40
:. Year: 2003
:. Country: USA
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Apart from the return of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, Bad Boys II especially marks the return of Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer, an all powerful duo whose mere name provokes dread in cinephiles.
Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) are back on duty and this time face a Colombian trafficker, a Rasta gang, the Russian Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan. Oddly this continuation of Bad Boys, a B movie and unexpected blockbuster, imposes itself more in continuity of a televisual heritage than as a sequel. The film opens on an anti-drug operation in Miami, openly evoking Miami Vice, and on to a visit at the coroner's office (one thinks of CSI, produced by Bruckheimer and Six Feet Under), while the affection montage of the action scenes seem to want to retake the ground conquered by Fastlane, the over-the-top and short-lived show directed by McG (Charlie' s Angels).
As always, Bay's "formula" is based on blue-toned cinematography, epileptic editing, and a plethora of explosions. If the director manages to cause a few moments of visual excitation, in particular the shoot-out in an abandoned house, his style gets on badly with the car chases which scatter themselves in extreme editing; the endless shootings, sometimes effective, are on the crossing of Ringo Lam and Sam Peckinpah. While one may appreciate that the director has pushed the limits of violence and gore, daring to create an action film for adults, unlike the hypocritical XXX, excesses of gore, which are amusing and welcome at first, end up falling into a certain gratuity that turns to vulgarity; a feeling reinforced by large shots of a camera that goes underneath the skirts of girls in a nightclub.
While Smith is perfectly at ease in a role that fits him like a glove and which should have been more developed, Lawrence is credible as a scapegoat but certainly not as an action hero; without true cinematic compatibility, their presences are canceled, contrary to the Owen Wilson/Jackie Chan duo where each one of them is limited to his specialty: humor for one, acrobatics for the other.
But especially troublesome is a certain nauseous ideology "conveyed" by the film, a penchant for bellicose imperialism, a recurring theme in Bay's pictures. The clandestine commando operation in Cuba ends with a chase where a Hummer, the American military symbol, destroys a shantytown, generally a third world attribute; a scene all the more unwelcome as it finds an unexpected echo in the current geopolitical context. In addition to an obvious desire for world domination, Bad Boys II seems to confirm Bay's revengeful impulses through an awkward cinematic process. After the last useless act of Pearl Harbor where Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett alone avenged the honor of America, Will Smith and his troop unload in Cuba to face a drug trafficker and a corrupt Cuban army, an episode which seems straight out of Chuck Norris cinema during the Reagan era...
Fred Thom
 Movie Reviews: 1998 - 2011
Movie Reviews: 2012 - present
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