April 7, 1995 | If you simply can’t wait until Mel Gibson and Danny Glover get around to making another Lethal Weapon movie, you can satisfy your craving for slam-bang action-comedy high jinks with Bad Boys. There isn’t much here that you haven’t seen before, but there is a great deal that is funny and flat-out exciting.
You would be correct if you called the movie formulaic. On the other hand, producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer would be just as correct if they replied: ”Yeah, but it’s our formula.”
Bad Boys is very much in the tradition of such Simpson-Bruckheimer hits as Beverly Hills Cop (and Cop 2), Top Gun and Days of Thunder. That means you can expect lots of shattering glass, loud music, orange sunsets and foulmouthed jocularity. It also means you can expect acres of slick, smoky ambience and the rapid-fire editing style common to MTV and high-gloss commercials. No one who sees Bad Boys will be surprised to learn that its director, newcomer Michael Bay, has dozens of music videos and advertising campaigns to his credit.
At the center of all this sound and fury, Martin Lawrence (of TV’s Martin) and Will Smith (of TV’s Fresh Prince of Bel Air) trade quips and dodge bullets with appealing exuberance. They are cast as hard-charging Miami cops who, predictably, are total opposites when off duty. Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) is a down-to-earth family man who worries about not spending enough ”quality time” with his attractive wife (Theresa Randle). Mike Lowery (Smith) is a free-wheeling bachelor who, thanks to a family inheritance, has just enough money to support a flashy lifestyle.
For reasons that are never entirely credible, Marcus and Mike have to switch identities to gain the trust of Julie Mott (Tea Leoni), the only witness to the brutal murder of a suspect in a $100-million drug robbery. (The drugs, it should be noted, were swiped from a police storage room, so there is a fair amount of pressure on the Miami cops to retrieve the booty.) For Mike, the case is a personal vendetta, since one of his ex-girlfriends was killed along with the suspect. For Marcus, however, the case is merely a source of discomfort, since it forces him to spend a lot of time alone with the sexy Julie in Mike’s bachelor pad.
Bad Boys is the kind of movie in which details of plot, dialogue and character development are presented merely as filler between the action set pieces. But, then again, some filler is better than other filler. In this case, the stuff between the shoot-outs often is hilarious, if not always logical. Better still, the shoot-outs are impressively staged without being unduly graphic.
Smith, who looks like Lawrence Fishburne’s buff younger brother, is at his best in moments of mock sincerity and straight-faced sarcasm. (”Don’t be alarmed,” he announces as he enters a swanky mansion. ”We’re Negroes.”) Lawrence takes a somewhat blunter approach with equally amusing results, particularly when he tries to convince his jealous wife that, hey, there’s nothing funny going on.
In addition to Randle and Leoni, who are everything they have to be, the supporting cast includes Saverio Guerra as a doorman who would rather be a cop, Joe Pantoliano as a police captain who lets Mike and Marcus be as nasty as they want to be, and Tcheky Karyo (La Femme Nikita) as the snarling piece of Eurotrash who masterminds the drug robbery. You probably can guess which one of these people won’t be around for Bad Boys 2.
