Movie Review: Bad Boys

Stars: 3 out of 5

Pros: Some fun action and comedy

Cons: Cliches; not all the comedy works

The Bottom Line:

A 90’s movie

Typical buddy cop plot

Just average fun

“Do What You Do, Only Faster.”

Having watched the TV Show L.A.’s Finest over the last couple of years, I was curious to see the Bad Boys movies since the show was a spin off (of sorts) from the second movie.  So when I spotted the first two movies on TV recently, I figured this was the perfect time to view them.  Naturally, I started with the first.

This movie takes us back to 1995 and introduces us to cops Marcus Burnette (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith).  They are longtime friends and partners.  Naturally, they are also polar opposites (this is a buddy cop action/comedy film, after all).  Things get very complicated for them when someone breaks into the police lock up and steals hundreds of thousands of drug evidence.  When an informant of Mike’s is killed trying to get some information for him, they wind up also having to babysit Julie (Téa Leoni), the only surviving witness.  Will that be enough to figure out what is going on?

As I already hinted, this is your typical buddy cop action/comedy movie.  You might not know exactly how they will figure things out, but you know they will.  I had fun getting to the end of the movie, so I’m not complaining too loudly.

Now, I watched this movie on TV.  As such, I’m sure some things were edited out for time.  Still, I felt like in the rush to wrap up the movie with a big action scene (and I did enjoy the big action scene), some of the story points were left wide opened.  Maybe it was the editing of the film, however, because there were some pretty bad edits even in that final scene, that made it hard to follow the action.

The plot included some pretty absurd twists as Marcus and Mike got involved in solving the case.  Did I honestly believe that they would go along with what their captain told them to do at that point?  No.  But it did make for some fun comedy.  Other times, they argued so much in what was supposed to be funny scenes but didn’t really feel that funny to me.  So the comedy was as a mixed bag as the plot was.

The characters were pretty typical characters for this type of movie.  They were a little deeper than cliché, but only just a touch.  Still, I cared enough to want the characters to succeed.  This is no fault of the actors, who did what they could with the script.  Oh, and why did Julie have to do the stupidest thing she could half of the time?  Again, I’m blaming the script for these too stupid to live moments.

I will give the movie this.  It may have been released in 1995, but it wasn’t quite as dated as I expected it to be.  Oh, there were still dated clothes and hairstyles, but it could have been much worse.

I had never been super anxious to watch these movies, and I can see why.  While Bad Boys had its moments, watching them on TV was definitely the right way to go.  I’m still definitely planning to watch the second one.  If you can find them on TV and you are curious about them, watch it.  But don’t go out of your way to do so.