#my sense of humour is lowbrow to say the least

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The Duchess of Richmond’s ball, Waterloo (1970)

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Movie Review | Bad Boys II (Bay, 2003)

This presents some of the strongest arguments in favour of and against Michael Bay as a director. On a technical level, it has some of his tightest action direction. Bay’s first few films showed a progression in decreasing spatial coherence (the original Bad Boys feels downright classical in comparison), and this movie is firmly in line with that trend, but there’s none of the shapelessness that can make some of films unwatchable. The barrage of muscular camera moves, flagrantly glossy, almost radioactive lighting and machine gun editing accumulate into a palpable momentum, powering the action with a clear forward propulsion that makes them work on a visceral, gut level even if you might not be able to connect all the dots in the moment. On a pure entertainment level, the movie peaks with a car chase in the first act that escalates in the level of carnage in an almost parodic manner, with the villains stealing a car hauler and making a goddamn mess on the freeway by dropping cars left and right while the heroes try not to damage their Ferrari. (Of course, that’s all in vain when one of them accidentally fires a machine gun inside the car.)

But the movie almost refuses to work on the level of mindless entertainment, thanks to Bay’s irrepressibly crass sense of humour and moral bankruptcy. The first Bad Boys had its share of sitcom-level humour, but it was mostly inoffensive and was sold enthusiastically by the leads. (There’s a scene where Martin Lawrence impersonates Will Smith by saying his name really slowly that never fails to make me laugh.) Here, we get scenes like Martin Lawrence getting shot in the ass during a gunfight with the KKK, Lawrence and Will Smith having a euphemism-laden conversation about said ass wound (and Lawrence’s inability to get an erection) played all over an electronics store, rat-fucking (literally, not in the political sense), Lawrence accidentally ingesting ecstasy, a car chase where they run over exhumed corpses, and a sequence in a morgue where the camera leers lasciviously over a bosomy corpse that Lawrence subsequently has to get uncomfortably close to. (I can only imagine Bay was pandering to necrophiliacs here, as it’s still one of the most inexplicable things I’ve seen in a movie.)

And it’s not just that movie gets its heroes into tasteless shenanigans, it presents them as instigators, practically sociopathic in their glee. The title almost guarantees they’ll cause an awful lot of collateral damage over the course of the movie, but it turns out that extends to leveling an entire, densely-populated shantytown (a scene stolen from Jackie Chan’s Police Story but with Chan’s humanity thrown out the window) and during their off-hours, bullying a kid who wants to date Lawrence’s daughter with racial and sexual taunting and threats of violence. Bay’s politics can be hard to read on the whole (there’s a fairly constant distrust of authority figures, and an emerging compassionate streak in his more recent work), but what can be gleaned from here is pretty reprehensible, a might-makes-right ethos that extends to a fairly fascistic view of police work. The movie believes these characters should be allowed to do whatever they want, on or off the job, and cheers them on for it. (This extends even to foreign policy, as the movie concludes with an illegal incursion into Cuba, in contrast to the critical, if not entirely coherent, view Bay’s recent films have taken on foreign intervention.) Each atrocity gets a high five.

I no longer loathe Bad Boys II the way I did when I watched it on my first viewing, as I think it has value in showing Bay’s id unleashed and his artistic impulses expressed in their purest, fullest form, and in its best moments, works on a giddy, lizard brain level thanks to the vigorous action direction. But those impulses don’t always work well together, and the end result is still too conflicted for me to give it a pass. Does it want to be a lowbrow slambang action thriller like the original? Then why the unrelenting mean streak? Does it want to be a morally queasy policier in the style of William Friedkin? Then why all the dumbassed humour and the glee in the action sequences? Does it want to tread the same hyperkinetic, darkly comic territory as the Crank films? Then why all the bloat? The film is two-and-a-half hours long, clumsily veering between action scenes and attempted comic relief hung on a plot that doesn’t deserve the length, and tacking on two climaxes (because one is for pussies). The unmitigated maximalism can be interesting at an abstract level but becomes a chore when the movie runs at least half an hour more than it needs to. But still, even with all that bloat and the ugly baggage of the rest of the movie, those action sequences threaten to almost work on the level of pure energy. Almost.