Bad Boys II movie cast and crew

Martin Lawrence

Will Smith

Jordi Mollà


Gabrielle Union

Peter Stormare

Theresa Randle

Joe Pantoliano

Michael Shannon

Jon Seda

Yul Vazquez

Jason Manuel Olazabal

Otto Sanchez

Henry Rollins

Bad Boys II movie overview

There is an ugly scene in "Bad Boys II" that I want to tell you about. A cop played by Martin Lawrence is alarmed that his 15-year-old daughter is going out on her first date. We see the girl, pretty and hopeful in her new dress, being fussed over by her mother. The doorbell rings, and Lawrence opens it to confront her date, a nervous 15-year-old boy, tall and thin, neatly dressed.

Marcus and his partner (Will Smith) intimidate the boy without mercy. He is threatened with the unspeakable if he lays a hand on the girl. They demand to know if he is a virgin. They slap him with the N-word. At one point a gun is pulled on him. "Ever had sex with a man?" Smith asks. Then with a leer: "Want to?" The boy is terrified.

The needless cruelty of this scene took me out of the movie and into the minds of its makers. What were they thinking? Have they so lost touch with human nature that they think audiences will like this scene? Do they think it's funny? Did the actors voice any objections? It's the job of the producer to keep a film on track; did Jerry Bruckheimer notice anything distasteful? Or is it possible that everyone connected with the film has become so desensitized by the relentless cynical aggression of movies like this that the scene passed without comment? "Bad Boys II" is a bloated, unpleasant assembly-line extrusion in which there are a lot of chases and a lot of killings and explosions. Oh, it's all done with competent technique. Michael Bay, the director, is a master of this sort of thing, and his screenplay was labored over by at least four writers, although there is not an original idea in it. Even the villain is a bargain-basement ripoff of Al Pacino's great drug dealer in "Scarface." The plot, briefly, involves Smith and Lawrence as partners on the trail of a drug supplier who moves his money into Cuba. Gabrielle Union plays Lawrence's sister, a DEA agent from New York who has been seeing Smith. Joe Pantoliano is the obligatory police captain who constantly chews out the guys (and for once, a movie takes notice of the body count after a chase scene). No one in the movie is very interesting; our eyes glaze over during yet another bone-tired retread of chase scenes that we have seen over and over again. Occasionally there is variety, as when the boys shoot up a Ku Klux Klan rally; I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I don't see anything funny about burning crosses and guys in hoods. Do these images need to be given fresh circulation in 2003? The movie has a carelessness that shows a contempt for the audience. Consider a sequence in which two helicopters pursue a speedboat near Miami. I was never sure who was in the speedboat, or why it was fleeing. Maybe I missed something, but it didn't make much difference. Eventually the cops spray the boat with automatic weapons, the engine dies, and we hear "the boat is dead in the water." End of scene. As nearly as I can tell, the only reason this scene is in the movie is so that we can watch two helicopters chasing a speedboat. In a movie that is painfully long at 146 minutes, why is this scene taking up our time? The movie is so choppy in its nervous editing that a lot of the time we're simply watching senseless kinetic action. The chase scenes and shoot-outs are broken down into closeups that deny us any sense of the physical relationship of the actors or the strategy of a chase. It's all just movement.

For example, after the action moves to the druglord's mansion in Cuba, the heroes commandeer his bright yellow Hummer for a getaway under fire. At one point it looked very much to me as if the Hummer drove into a pond, which would have brought an end to the chase, but no, seconds later it's back in the chase--no pond, no nothing.

What happens next is kind of sickening. The Hummer speeds down a hillside entirely covered by the tarpaper shanties of poor people. Walls and roofs, doors and windows, dogs and chickens, corrugated iron and curtains, all fly into the air as the Hummer cuts a swath through this settlement. And I'm thinking, people live there. There's a quick mention that drug production takes place on the hillside, but still: Dozens of poor shantytown dwellers must have been killed, not that the movie notices.

There was once a time when a hero would sacrifice his own life rather than injure innocent bystanders. No longer. The heroes of "Bad Boys II" are egotistical monsters, concerned only with their power, their one-liners, their weapons, their cars, their desires. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that characters who wipe out a village can also make cruel jokes at the expense of a kid on his first date. Everybody involved in this project needs to do some community service.

Bad Boys2 movie review

There must have been two hundred and forty shots in the first one hundred and twenty seconds of Bad Boys II. That amounts to two shots per second. Makes no sense, does it? Well, neither does Bad Boys II. The last time a director and his stars waited eight years to re-team for a sequel to a buddy cop sleeper was Another 48 Hrs. As we always learn the hard way, history does repeat itself. While this sequel is ten times more kinetic than the original, it is also an empty-headed bubble of testosterone that explodes in the viewer’s face, potentially scarring them for the duration of the film.

Michael Bay returns to direct Martin Lawrence and Will Smith as Miami narcotics cops Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowrey, once again on a mission to dethrone another drug kingpin (Jordi Mollà), this time intent on controlling the flow of ecstasy in Miami (updated from the heroin in the superior original). During the investigation—and by “investigation,” I mean “car chases”—Lowrey forms a relationship with Marcus’ younger sister (Gabrielle Union), a DEA Agent also connected to the case. Also returning are Theresa Randle (as Burnett’s wife) and Joe Pantoliano (as the obligatory angry police captain, who breathes the mantra “woosah” to calm himself down). Pantoliano, in his few scenes, is an absolute riot.

The plot is completely irrelevant, as with nearly every movie released from May 1st to August 31st. The real draw is an outstanding action sequence plopped right smack in the middle of the film as the centerpiece. I had always envisioned an extravagant car chase that involved a carrier truck (the type that harnesses eight to ten cars) dropping its cargo onto the street like flies to slow down the heroes. This is the third highly touted freeway chase of the summer (after the f/x-driven one in The Matrix Reloaded and another Miami-set demolition derby in 2 Fast 2 Furious) and easily the most exciting, featuring spectacular stunts and ignoring the temptation to load the sequence full of phony-looking CGI, giving the viewer the real temptation to utter the word “whoa.”

“Whoa” soon turns to “woe” as the film becomes more and more tiresome. The banter remains the same in nearly every scene as the events tumble from one shoot-out to another, offering only misogynistic jabs to give the viewer rest. And on that subject, it is made perfectly clear that Michael Bay hates women. While this note was only hinted at in Armageddon and Pearl Harbor (in both films, the non-disaster related drama was a direct result of a foolhardy female), Bay comes out of the closet to reveal a true loathing for the opposite gender. In his orange-colored universe, women are only strippers, models, or teases. So call me a fool, but I thought Bay had really matured as a filmmaker with his old-fashioned war epic Pearl Harbor. He ends up going back to square one and comes up with zero.

The chemistry is still good between Smith and Lawrence because their relationship appears to have grown since the last film. Most important, the relationship continues to grow through the characters' understanding of one another. Smith also displays much more comfort with Lawrence for this sequel than he did when he re-teamed with Tommy Lee Jones for Men in Black II. I could see why they have made it clear in interviews that they are eager to re-team for a Bad Boys III.

At 146 minutes, Bad Boys II ends up showing every move the heroes and villains make, so there are no surprises whatsoever. A smart action movie would know what to leave out for the viewer to be surprised, or watch in excitement as another character learns something new. The film shows us everything so there is nothing left for us to figure out on our own. And there is nothing satisfying about a movie with no surprises. The only real surprise is how terribly overlong the entire venture is. This is a 2-hour movie bloated to 2 ½ hours but ends up feeling like three, tumbling from one hopeful climax to another. Bad Boys II goes nowhere, and takes a long time to get there.

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