Movie Reaction: Bad Boys 4 Life

Formula: Bad Boys ^ Gemini Man

It's easy to not realize that Bad Boys was a pretty important movie for American cinema over the last 25 years. It was a modest hit at the time, finishing just below Waiting to Exhale at the box office, but it launched the careers of two of the most dominant box office forces of the next two decades: Will Smith and Michael Bay. I know we like to make fun of Michael Bay now for his excess. He is to movies what Nickelback is to music. You really can't talk about blockbuster filmmaking in the 90s or 00s without bringing him up though. Transformers alone solidified the major studio obsession with using intellectual property for everything. Will Smith needs less reminding. Since he started making movies, he's been THE movie star of this generation, even more than Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, or - we forget - Adam Sandler. In both cases, Smith and Bay probably would've been fine without Bad Boys. It's also possible they wouldn't've been though, and imagine how things would've been different.

Personally, I have no fondness for the Bad Boys series. I'm not against them. They just never made a dent for me. In my mind, Bad Boys is the buddy cop series that wanted to look cool above all else. I remembering being less impressed by Bad Boys 2 than the original. Bad Boys 4 Life sounded like an awful and desperate idea. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are too old to be the coolest cops in Miami. While Michael Bay is no auteur, if he wasn't even willing to return to direct, what does that say about the idea? Even calling it Bad Boy 4 Life - a title clearly intended to be for a fourth installment - sounded desperate. They'd only use that title now if they felt certain this wouldn't earn another sequel, right?

To its credit, Bad Boys 4 Life addresses many of the concerns I had pretty directly. Mike (Will Smith) and Marcus (Martin Lawrence) aren't the spry young cops they used to be anymore. Marcus accepts this, deciding to go into retirement. Mike insists that he's the same physical specimen he's always been; that is, until he gets shot in a convoluted assassination attempt. You see, there's a Mexican witch (their words, not mine) who tasks her son with getting revenge on everyone who did their family wrong. And Mike did them wrong. By the time Mike is back in action, his job has been handed to a special task force called A.M.M.O., employing the likes of Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Charles Melton, and Paola Nunez. Nunez plays an old flame of Marcus'. This is a pretty obvious "pass the torch" movie, even though, let's be honest. Just like there's not Fast and the Furious without Vin Diesel, there's no Bad Boys without Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. The story actually gets a lot more needlessly complicated than this, but that's all I care to get into.

It's hard to say whether the movie believes the thesis that Marcus and Mike are too old for this. They say it a lot. Martin Lawrence certainly didn't commit to an intense training regiment to prepare for the movie. However, it takes Mike getting shot to slow him down. And it doesn't really slow him down. He's still doing a lot of "young man stunts" despite being less than a year removed from a life-threatening gunshot. I really would not have minded a couple scenes in which a more easily fatigued Mike tells Charles Melton to take this fight. Smith has been good lately about ceding the spotlight to others. Then again, I understand that, as much as I like her, Vanessa Hudgens wasn't the draw to this movie for anyone. I'd be fine of this was a launching pad for Melton, Hudgens, and Ludwig to get more action movies though. They fit in this movie well.

I'm told that Michael Bay didn't direct this movie, but I hardly noticed. This movie is still filled with explosions, hero shots, and over-the-top staging. This series is still as much about excess as ever. So, props to the directing pair of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah in what I believe is their Hollywood directing debut. It probably helps that the Smith and Lawrence's chemistry works in nearly any scenario.

Bad Boys 4 Life is a movie I enjoyed through all the eye rolls. I got a few good chuckles. The action is constant enough that I wasn't bored very often. Smith still holds the screen like few others. The movie certainly plays more to established fans than casual or unfamiliar viewers. It's just all very extra. Mike can't just be slow because he's getting older. He has to get shot. Marcus can't just be "getting too old for this shit". He has to have a grandson named after him to rethink his priorities. They can't just get pulled back into the case because Mike was shot. Someone else close to them has to be killed. Then there's the third act twist that is an insane story escalation. A movie like Bad Boys 4 Life tends to need to win me over with the details: how it stages action scenes in the middle of the movie, the banter between the leads, etc. BB4L is missing a lot of that. It gets the big stuff right though, which is why it's a movie I happily enjoyed once and have no intention to see again.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend