capsule : annoyingly unentertaining , obvious and paper-thin buddy/cop/drug/sexy-witness movie .
presence of director michael bay shows none of the talent he demonstrated in the rock .
i’ve seen this movie already , i said , as i looked at the box art .
no , i haven’t even seen a trailer for the movie ; i don’t even know what it’s about , but i can look at the way they’re promoting it , and i know i’ve seen it already .
i thought : it’s about these two cops .
and they’re buddies , sort of .
they’re at each other’s throats a lot , but they really do like each other .
and everyone else in their department hates them ’cause they’re hot-shots .
and they have some kind of diametric opposition in their relationship .
and one day they’re in the middle of cop business as usual when they get mixed up in this plot that involves a really sadistic bad guy with lots of henchmen who can never hit anything with the billions of rounds of ammo they are always carrying .
and the bad guy is a drug lord .
and there’s a witness , and she’s this sexy thing who rubs both of them the wrong way .
and their supervisor wants their badges for breakfast when they blow up half the town bringing this guy down .
i only missed the bit about the badges .
the rest i got dead-on .
and i hadn’t even left the video store yet .
the cops in this movie are will smith and martin lawrence , and the bad guy is the immensely underutilized tcheky karyo .
smith plays a cop who has a trust fund and is thus not a cop for the money ; martin l . is a family man ( shades of the now-tired lethal weapon dynamic here ) whose wife and he are at total odds .
this leads to some strained scenes about lawrence’s ” not getting any ” , and some totally unneccesary bits with him skulking around his own house , thinking his partner is now his wife’s ” back door man ” .
not funny ; tiresome .
bad boys gets some of its incredibly meager selling points from the presence of will smith and martin lawrence .
will smith is a natural , and i’m happy to see him in movies like six degrees . . .
and men in black .
he’s funny and charming without trying to be ; he really does seem to be enjoying himself .
martin lawrence is a different story ; he’s so uptight and verbally constipated that sitting through his improvised riffs are a trial .
movies like this are not about originality .
i know this .
they are about style and energy and synergy between actors .
i know this , too .
and yet , while watching bad boys , which its glamorous photography and impossibly exact stunt choreography , i felt fed up .
i’d seen con air , which despite being completely implausible , was still great fun , because it tried however feebly to put some new life into the mix .
bad boys is a dry run — and overlong , too , clocking in at just over two hours with a lot more by-play than i felt could be justified .
i could write this movie .
you could write this movie .
many people have .
many people will continue to write this movie , over and over again .
other people will buy it from them , and make it , and we will pay money to see it .
more the fools we all .
in a terrifyingly prescient line from his book a scanner darkly , phil k . dick once mused that the mcdonaldburger ( as he called it ) would eventually eclipse money as the token of cultural and financial exchange .
one day we will all just sit in our living rooms and sell the same burger back and forth to each other .
the same could be said about this movie .
i have the sinking feeling we’re going to see it again .
soon .