Danny Butterman, Nick Frost’s character in Hot Fuzz, convinced Simon Pegg’s Nicholas Angel that Bad Boys II is the pinnacle of modern action cinema. Sorry, Danny, but you were miles off. Michael Bay’s ballad of bombast is about as obnoxious, excessive, incoherent, and excessively obnoxiously incoherent as action movies get. Less this shit just got real, more this just got real shit.
So, 17 years on, the prospect of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence returning for one last go at loud cars and even louder one-liners was a frankly unedifying one. However, with Bay a (mostly) distant memory, replaced by hotshot Belgian directing duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, Bad Boys For Life is something of a blast: funny, occasionally surprising, and self-aware enough to challenge the mindset of the first two movies.
Perhaps reflecting their divergent statuses over the last decade (having moved away from acting for a while, this is Lawrence’s first starring role since the third Big Momma’s House film in 2011), the focus here is squarely on Smith’s Mike Lowrey, who finds himself between the crosshairs of a genuinely menacing villain (Jacob Scipio). Not only is Lowrey being challenged physically, he’s constantly being challenged to do something about his flashy, superficial, but ultimately empty lifestyle, and called out on his (and, by extension, the franchise’s) toxic masculinity bullshit.
With Smith carrying the movie, it means Lawrence gets to have a grand old time as the tension-deflating comic relief.
There’s also a fair amount of pointed ‘too old for this shit’ material — there are jokes about dyeing Smith’s goatee, about Lawrence needing glasses and, at one point, Mike and Marcus take to the streets in a motorcycle/sidebar combo that basically makes this the most expensive, and explosive, episode of Last Of The Summer Wine ever.
Of course, much of the pontificating about trying to be good men, instead of bad boys, is jettisoned for the obligatory gun-toting, bullet-spaffing climax. But even if it has its cake and eats it too, it’s refreshing to see a movie like this even stop to think about the calories. And, in another interesting move, these action scenes are surprisingly easy to follow, with Adil and Billal (that’s how they’re billed; first names only, bad boys for life) jettisoning Bay’s beloved choppy quick edits in favour of longer beats and clearly established spatial geography. Frankly, you can tell what’s going on. Perhaps that’s a deliberate move, to reflect the advanced years of its protagonists, but it’s a blessed relief.
With Smith carrying the movie, it means Lawrence, freed from any desire to look cool getting out of a car in slo-mo, gets to have a grand old time as the tension-deflating comic relief. It’s still early in 2020, but one late-in-the-movie line promises to be one of the year’s best. Sadly, there’s little room for the new faces — including Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig and Paola Núñez as supercops who find themselves butting heads, at least at first, with Lowrey and Burnett — to make much of an impact. Still, this is clearly a reinvigorated franchise with one eye on the future, so some of them might get a chance down the line. Maybe next time Smith and Lawrence can careen downhill in a bathtub.
