Real quick: Was 2003 our tackiest year, as a species? I know the competition is stiff—there was 1997’s swing revival, 1998’s failure to contain and exterminate said swing revival, or literally any given moment in the Trump era (for instance, the random day I’m writing this, when America’s toilet king bragged on Twitter that his daily COVID-19 press briefings are a “ratings hit” rivaling even the Bachelor finale!).
But remember 2003, though, when girls wore those miniskirts that were like six floaty napkins stapled to a scrunchie, with perhaps an Edwardian waistcoat sewn of cobwebs as a top? Where at any moment a baby’s sneeze across campus might expose Kaylee’s entire bunghole and even the slouchy Western belt she wore over her three layers of different-colored camisoles couldn’t save her? In case you’ve repressed the memory, 2003 was the kind of year where Jessica Simpson might wear rubber flip-flops to the Golden Globes, and Nicole Richie was nearly elected president on a platform of “straight blonde hair on top, long curly dark brown extensions underneath, one feather.” The 2003 vibe—culturally, socially, politically, spiritually—was very “energy drink commercial directed by Mark McGrath, and not Mark McGrath in his prime, either.” Millions of Americans were forced to mourn Mr. Rogers while wearing a hot-pink corduroy train conductor’s hat. Never again!
Bad Boys II is a 2003 movie.
Verily, the first ten minutes of Bad Boys II are unimpeachable. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are police officers in Miami who are also good boys. They are hard at work investigating a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar international ecstasy smuggling operation that for some reason is being funneled through an unincorporated community of eight wetland yokels who live in an old boot.
On the night that literally millions of dollars in pills are set to drift ashore in a rusty corn can, the swampy clods throw a Klan rally to celebrate their forthcoming bazonga paycheck and subsequent appearance on My Lottery Dream Home (a bigger boot!). But just as the crosses begin to flicker alight, two of the merry Klansmen doff their hoods to reveal…whoa, it’s Will Smith and Martin Lawrence! Did you believe me earlier when I said they were good boys? You idiot!
Smith and Lawrence, public servants paid with taxpayer dollars, then absolutely indiscriminately massacre the Klansmen using guns, explosions, a helicopter, and Henry Rollins. Which, obviously, if you have to massacre someone, make it an eager foot soldier in a white supremacist domestic terrorist organization with ties to the highest echelons of American political power working to entrench brutal inequalities and bring back slavery if they’re being honest, but also, maybe it’s better, as a rule, for the state to stay out of the massacre business? Does that make me a Republican? Or the opposite? Either way, Smith and Lawrence have a job to do, which is to stop kids on spring break from having too much fun dancing.
In the melee, Smith shoots Lawrence in his anus. Ten minutes of perfect cinema.
The movies were just kind of figuring out how to use computers in 2003, and nobody was just kind of figuring out how to use computers harder than Michael Bay. It’s tempting to say that every frame of Bad Boys II looks like a TV commercial, but truly every frame looks like a print advertisement, like those Candies ads where Jenny McCarthy’s taking a shit, shallow and glossy and tinged acid green. There are four car chases, one of which is at least fifteen minutes long. Even the most passing transitions are giddily tasteless: the camera EXPLODES out of the speedboat’s tailpipe and ZOOMS across Biscayne Bay and WHAMS down the ventilation shaft in the backward sunglasses factory and SHOOMPS into the buttcrack of a raver’s low-rise jeans and SPROINGS across her transverse colon and SQUEAKS through her appendix and AIRHORNS out her belly button and PLOPS into the Cuban drug lord’s mojito as he shoots his favorite nephew in the head while saying, “Adios, kemosabe,” or something fucking cool like that.
When faced with a choice, Bay picks “all of the above” every time. He’s like a dog in one of those obedience trials who’s like, “Obedience? I don’t know her,” and just goes buck wild on the sausages. Except instead of “obedience” it’s “having a coherent plot that holds the audience’s attention” and instead of “sausages” it’s “explosions, Ferrari chases, and how many different cool kinds of box could a gun come in.”
Which, to be clear, I support. I was twenty-one in 2003, and tasteless shit isn’t just IN my blood, IT IS MY BLOOD. I crave excess! There’s something else I crave a little bit more, though, which is all of the parts in Bad Boys II when Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are yelling at each other. More of that, please, Mr. Bay! Maybe 10 percent less car-chasing, 40 percent more bickering! It’s the first rule of filmmaking: when you have Will Smith and Martin Lawrence at your disposal to do unlimited bickering, you do not NECESSARILY need to add a scene where a Humvee obliterates a Cuban shantytown, killing many hundreds of impoverished children! Smith! Lawrence! Brutally roasting each other! Make it four hours long! That’s your blockbuster! NO NEED TO GILD THE LILY, BAY.
Maybe if I understood why the Humvee was obliterating the Cuban shantytown, this diversion would feel worth it to me, but as far as I can tell, the plot of Bad Boys II is…MIAMI.
?
Here’s what happens, as best I can understand it. Martin Lawrence’s sister, Gabrielle Union, is a DEA agent (?) who has gone undercover (?) to infiltrate…something drugs. Something has something to do with the pills from the beginning, and something to do with Russians laundering (?) money (?). Unfortunately, the “bogeys” (did not write down who that was in reference to, do not remember) do a hit on Gabrielle Union’s friend (?), causing everyone to car chase for one year. A semitruck full of evil Haitians is chasing Gabrielle Union, who is chasing the bogeys (?), because they stole her Russian’s $2 million, maybe. Will Smith is chasing the semitruck in his Ferrari (for seriously SO long—HOW IS THIS FERRARI NOT FASTER THAN THE SEMITRUCK?) on the surface streets of downtown Miami, occasionally firing his assault rifle haphazardly into large crowds of civilians. People are just getting STRAIGHT-UP MURDERED. And what are they trying to track down again, $2 million? Just one of these wrongful death lawsuits is going to cost the City of Miami that much, and Will Smith has killed approximately seven thousand people at this point!! Let it go, dog!
One cool thing about this movie is it’s got all the kinds of criminals. It’s got the Russian criminals! The KKK criminals! The Haitian criminals! A Cuban guy, I think! That’s all the kinds!
The Haitians in the semitruck start dropping their cargo, which is cars, on Will Smith to get him off their tail. These Haitians will NOT stop throwing cars at Will Smith! I wish this movie would stop perpetuating the old stereotypes about Haitians constantly throwing cars.
Smith and Lawrence go back to the office where their boss (JOEY! PANTS!) yells at them for not being “subtle” and “tactical” enough (i.e., totaling twenty-two cars and a boat and uncounted human lives [never mentioned]).
Over at his weird three-quarter-scale mansion (seriously, the ceiling in this one hallway is like five feet high and it is legitimately extremely weird and nobody says anything about it, they just stoop and shuffle around???), the Cuban ecstasy lord discovers that rats are eating all his money, and then says a good line: “Carlos, this is a stupid fucking problem to have, but it is a problem.” I laughed! His henchman agrees to call an exterminator.
Meanwhile, the bad boys are attempting to track down the Haitians, so they go to some Haitian guy’s extremely culturally sensitive burning-candle-and-spooky-baby-doll-head shop looking for leads.
Bad Boy: We’re looking for someone. Haitian blond with dreads.
Haitian Guy: Oh, Blondy-dread?
Sometimes I write fake dialogue and pretend that it’s real dialogue, as a joke. The above is not one of those times.
He refuses to tell them where Blondy-dread is, so they bash and destroy his entire livelihood with a stick. Serve and protect!
They track the Haitians to a rotting apartment filled, again, with burning candles and spooky baby doll heads (like, you know Haitians are…regular human people, right?) and immediately get into a horrific gun battle. One Haitian makes the toilet water go in Martin Lawrence’s mouth. Will Smith shoots another Haitian in the eyeball. Michael Bay does this shot where the camera circles around and around the wall, around and around and around and around and around, so if you accidentally swallowed rat poison earlier, you might want to check that part out. (Also, I don’t know, call me an SJW, but I think it kind of matters how many Haitians a cop shoots in the eyeball in one day?) Eventually, they find a Haitian camcorder with a tape in it, which will surely tell them the ????? they need to ???????????????????.
Now, one would assume that the Miami police department has, bare minimum, one VCR on one of those rolling carts they used to wheel into the classroom for movie day to perform the extremely basic task of playing the videotape that’s inside the Haitian camcorder. But I guess the cops have never needed to watch a video before 2003? Instead, Smith and Lawrence go to a crowded electronics store and bully some dweeb into accidentally playing the tape on all four hundred TV screens, which is uncomfortable (and possibly a crime?) because it’s completely a porno.
Then, I forget why, Smith and Lawrence go into a private room at the Best Buy for a quick heart-to-heart, but unfortunately the aforementioned dweeb switches all four hundred TV screens from the porno to a live feed of their feelings convo! Which is uncomfortable because Martin Lawrence is complaining at length about what Will Smith “did to his ass” and how his erection is now flaccid. Now everyone in the Best Buy thinks they’re gays!!!!!3
I have no idea what information they glean from the Haitian camcorder porno, but it is decided that they must go pose as exterminators to infiltrate the Cuban drug lord’s rat-infested mini-mansion. But first they have to literally go to exterminator school to learn how to fight bugs, which they do extremely badly, THANK GOD. LESS SHOOTING AND HOMOPHOBIA, MORE WILL SMITH AND MARTIN LAWRENCE EXTERMINATOR TRAINING MONTAGE. At the Cuban guy’s house, Lawrence sees two rats having sex and he’s like, “He’s straight pile-driving her! They fuck just like us!” HAHAHAHAHA!!! WOULD WATCH MARTIN LAWRENCE SEXUALLY DEGRADE A RAT FOR TWO-PLUS HOURS.
Their only job on this mission is to plant some kind of microphones in the house, or maybe tap the phones, who fucking cares, but instead of getting the job done and getting out of there ASAP, they both go tromping around the house, creepin’ and peepin’, until they get deeply and absolutely caught. Could you have done a worse job of this???? Will Smith discovers that the Cubans have chopped up a Russian and put him in a “tortilla bin” (what?), so they car-chase outta there in the exterminator van, presumably putting all actual employees of the REAL exterminator company, who still have to go to work tomorrow, in mortal peril. But who cares because they get away. Protect! And! Serve!
Holy shit, this movie is only HALFWAY OVER.
Next, Will Smith wears a suit that is three different shades of shiny purple with purple sunglasses. More like two-thousand-and-YEE-IKES!
Okay, there’s a thing I didn’t bother to tell you about earlier in the movie, but now it’s important. The Cuban drug lord is smuggling the ecstasy pills into America inside corpses inside coffins that are on boats. Then, they put money inside different corpses, or maybe the same corpses, and smuggle those back to Cuba. Here is another real line from the movie and not one I made up to make fun of the movie: “We need to put my money in coffins to Cuba faster!” Straightforward!
The bad boys grab Michael Shannon from the jail where he’s awaiting trial for being in the KKK at the beginning of the movie. They need him to do…something (?), so they put him in the trunk of their car and go on another car chase. Sometimes Michael Shannon will yell something hilarious, such as, “These men are violating my rights!” It’s funny when cops abuse their power!
The Cubans are driving a big van full of drugs / cash-stuffed human corpse turduckens. Smith and Lawrence chase them for so long that the corpses start falling out of the van, and it is very humorous! Haha, those are people’s relatives! Will Smith runs over somebody’s dad and his head pops off! Hahaha! Reminder: this is all to stop ecstasy from entering North America.
They sneak inside the Cuban crime mortuary, and Martin Lawrence accidentally eats two ecstasy pills out of a corpse’s rotten body cavity. They go to their captain’s house, where Martin Lawrence gets his erection back and why can’t this whole movie be Martin Lawrence on ecstasy at Joey Pants’s house?? Reader, it’s not.
They finally intercept all the money and the drugs, but unfortunately, the Cuban guy has intercepted Martin Lawrence’s sister and taken her back to Cuba. But Joey Pants won’t help! So they’re like, “We’ve just gotta do it ourselves, man.”
THAT IS ALREADY WHAT YOU DO! YOU HAVE NOT FOLLOWED ONE RULE THIS ENTIRE MOVIE!
But then, all their cop buddies are like, “We are also bad boys! We will go with you!” and the entire Miami police force leaves the country to invade a sovereign nation to save Martin Lawrence’s sister—who, by the way, works for the DEA! What are they doing to help? Is there truly no protocol for when a federal law enforcement agent gets kidnapped by a drug cartel? That’s never happened before?
Doesn’t matter because Smith and Lawrence have a “protocol” too, and it involves the phrase “throw a bag of cats and iguanas over the fence.” Nothing could go wrong!
After that, all they have to do is dig a tunnel under the Cuban guy’s lawn (how much are these Cuban people getting paid to dig this tunnel, BTW?), use a remote control car to distract some guys playing soccer, blow them up with a bomb, pop out of the hole in the lawn with a rocket launcher, jump out of a coffin and start shooting random landscapers, punch an elderly woman in the face, take a small child hostage, then race to Guantanamo Bay in a yellow Humvee, pulverizing the previously noted shantytown on the way. Like, those places aren’t sparsely populated—they are DENSELY OVERCROWDED WITH POOR PEOPLE AND CHILDREN. I mean, I like Gabrielle Union, but……??????
Now they’ve got the Cuban military shooting at them from behind and the American military shooting at them from the front, so they screech to a stop in a live minefield, and I’m sorry, but EVERYONE WOULD BE DEAD.
Then Martin Lawrence shoots the drug lord in the head and Will Smith and Gabrielle Union kiss.
This concludes………???……?………MIAMI.
RATING: 7/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
1 PLOT HOLE: Sometimes when Martin Lawrence and Will Smith capture a criminal, they triumphantly sing, “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do,” the theme from COPS, because they have defeated the “bad boys” (i.e., criminals). But then OTHER TIMES, they high-five and say, “Bad boys for life,” and THEY are the bad boys! So which is it!?!!?!??!? Get it together, movie!
2 I picked Bad Boys II instead of Bad Boys for this book because a hot sequel can attain a level of hype that the first movie in an eventual franchise just can’t. Bad Boys was a success. Bad Boys II was a WHOLE THING.
3 I forgot that in 2003 homophobia was normal as shit! The age of the metrosexual, I guess! Everything was vaguely homophobic, but also OBSESSED with gay men. Sometimes it is nice to live in the future.