It's the summer movie season, so why not use the blindspot series to catch up with some mindless popcorn flicks? Since Men in Black III was just released last weekend, I figured that I would hit the rewind button and check out the film that fully transitioned Will Smith from a sitcom star/rapper to a full fledged film star. That of course is Michael Bay's 1995 debut feature Bad Boys.
I couldn't help but notice that the film had a very similar formula to Lethal Weapon (and probably every other buddy cop film out there). Martin Lawrence is playing the overworked family man (ala Danny Glover), while Will Smith is the trigger-happy madman (ala Mel Gibson). Of course, Bad Boys is nothing like Lethal Weapon and it actually turned out to be a quite different film than I was expecting.
For a film called “Bad Boys“, you almost expect it to be more bad and less….goofy. One of the major plot elements of the film involves Lawrence and Smith's characters protecting a witness played by Téa Leoni. For reasons too lame to explain, Lawrence spends the bulk of the movie pretending to be Smith's character to Leoni (and vice versa). If that was not bad enough, he also has very contrived marital problems with his wife, who automatically assumes his long work schedule just means he is having an affair.
I suppose that with two actors known for comedy in the leads, I guess that it would be assumed that there would be a fair amount of comedy in the film. However, I would have preferred the comedy to occur more naturally in the film's plot, instead of with events that act as filler.
Despite all the goofiness, the film gets deadly serious for final major action scene of the film, which definitely fills the action and violence quota I was waiting for. It also features all the elements that would become all too familiar in Michael Bay's later films (mostly notably, shots of helicopters against the sunset).
Overall, even though it featured more comedy than I would have preferred, it was still pretty decent once the action started.
7 | FAIR
P.S. I have better films is mind for the other blindspot posts this summer (some of which I might be seeing theatrically).
