Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bad Boys’ on Netflix, a Screamingly Obnoxious Michael Bay “Classic” Starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence

With the recent popular resurgence of the Bad Boys franchise – two long-in-the-works sequels since 2020, including this year’s Bad Boys Ride or Die, have racked up more than $750 million at the box office – it makes sense to look back at where it began: the original 1995 film, which established Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as big screen stars, and marked the rather auspicious feature debut of then-music video and commercial director (and budding explosion fetishist) Michael Bay. Full disclosure: I had never seen Bad Boys until now, so anyone looking for nostalgia-stricken revisionism should look elsewhere. Nope, there’s only some hard, pipe-hittin’ truth in front of you today, dear reader, no apologies or effs given.

BAD BOYS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: I’d call what Mike Lowery (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) do “bickering,” but that implies lower volume. We meet them as they bellow and snipe at each other as Marcus slops his burger and fries all over Mike’s superexpensive Porsche. Mike is perturbed by this behavior, and you can tell because he says the f-word enough times to slay your mom 10 times over in cold blood before we even get past the cold open. Some sweaty thugs try to carjack them, and they just effed with the wrong effers, because not only are Mike and Marcus veteran Miami detectives who know their way around guns and scuffles, but the bad guys will inevitably be subject to their nonstop exhausting banter about how family man and dad of three Marcus never gets to have sex with his wife while Mike is a trust-fund playboy who doesn’t take kindly to getting ketchup spilled on his leather seats. They just go on and on and on and on and on. It’s a shock that their antagonists don’t just drop their guns and submit to arrest and go to jail where they can exist in relative peace.

After a screamingly loud scene in which Marcus tries unsuccessfully to have sex with his wife (Theresa Randle) and fails and his kids climb all over him and Mike comes to pick him up and they have inappropriate conversations in the audience of very young ears, they go to work to learn from their screamingly loud narcotics-beat tucked-into-khakis super Capt. Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano) that someone broke into the evidence vault and stole the $100 million worth of heroin from Mike and Marcus’ big bust. One hundred million dollars? you may be thinking. Yep. You heard right. That’s a lotta scratch. Even in 1995 dollars that’s enough to buy a couple of Guyanas with enough left over to grab Belize. This is one eensy example of how this movie overexaggerates every little thing until you can’t take anymore and just want to pound the eject button on the VCR. Sure you don’t want to make it $500 million just to be safe? Anyway, Joey Pants screams that infernal internal affairs is on his ass over this one, and it’s up to Marcus and Mike to suss out what the eff happened before they all get sent up the river to presumably be torn to shreds by alligators and then eaten by sharks and then nuked by terrorists, which is a really unpleasant way to go.

So Mike and Marcus occasionally interrupt their running verbal quarrels with violent shakedowns and even more violent run-ins with scuzzy Miami lowlifes. An informant-slash-call-girl friend of Mike’s gets murdered by said lowlifes, and Julie (Tea Leoni) is the only witness, so she’s on the run and they have to find her and protect her and this is where we start to wonder if this is a cop picture or a revenge picture but then realize it’s called Bad Boys for a reason, I guess. There’s an utterly pointless convolution-of-plot in which Mike and Marcus pretend to be each other, and it’s a shameless and transparent ploy to wring drops of comedy out of the bloodbath of shattering glass and smashed cars and barrels of ether just WAITING to erupt into flames, not to mention the egregious onslaught of nonsensical decisions by these characters. But the only thing louder than all this is the nonstop billion-decibel cussin’-ass repartee.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bay unleashes an Americanized riff on John Woo-ish gun-fu (think The Killer or Hard Boiled) here, an M.O. so overblown it makes OTT ’80s buddy-cop stuff like Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs. look like Merchant-Ivory productions.

Performance Worth Watching: In her big-screen breakout, Leoni leans into the ditzy-agent-of-chaos bit without being too much of an era-specific airhead; shout-out to John Salley for his amusing cameo as the Incredibly Tall Hacker in Coke-bottle Lenses.

Memorable Dialogue: I guess this is the classic bit: 

Mike: Now back up, put the gun down, and get me a pack of tropical fruit Bubblicious.

Marcus: And some Skittles.

Sex and Skin: A requisite scene in a Miami strip club, but it’s pretty tame. And do Bay’s trademark low-angle panty-cam shots count?

Our Take: I’ve never, ever liked Bayhem, but will ignore the tinfoil between my grinding teeth long enough to admit that he’s a skilled filmmaker who’s absolutely in control of the look and tone of his pieces of shit. Bad Boys’ lifeblood is its visual acuity, the likes of which can only be executed by someone who knows what they’re doing. And from the very beginning of his film career, Bay has known exactly what he’s doing: creating movies in the most obnoxious manner possible. I sat down to watch this film for the first time, hoping the relatively recent pushback against CG-addled extravaganzaism and praise for practical stunts and effects might save it from Bay’s trademark excessiveness, but no matter how many real cars and sets Bay destroys with blood spurting and fireballs arcing, there’s no getting past his grating, ruthlessly cynical method. Those wondering if Bad Boys has aged well should know that it’s as feculent as ever.

I know. I’m being mean. Loosen up. I hear you. I tried. I’ve even, as a child of the ’80s, enjoyed revising my dismissal of deeply silly action films (e.g., I’ve gone from loving the likes of Commando and Cobra to thinking they’re junk to loving them again, while realizing they’re objectively lousy). I’ll even admit that ’90s action films arrived at a time when I was discovering Woody Allen (for better or worse) and the Coen Bros., and munching the fruits of the post-Tarantino era. But watching Bad Boys is like being forced into the half-bath with a flatulent gorilla and a broken exhaust fan. It just fills the room until you feel like you have nowhere else to go but into the toilet tank, where you discover someone else’s weeks-old upper-decker. 

The depth and richness of Howard Atherton’s cinematography is a significant technical achievement – a bunch of these shots are dramatically lit jawdroppers for which Bay shows little appreciation, as he rapid-fire cuts and cuts and cuts in the music-video style that was fresh for a minute in the ’90s but here grows stale as you start pawing your pockets for a stray Excedrin. Lawrence and Smith’s improvised interactions are beloved by some, but to me were recrementitious to a fault. The plot is utter folly, driven by a logic that only gets us from one idiotic and brutally violent set piece to the next. Bay doesn’t invent new means of conveying action, but rather, cops moves from the many action films of the previous decade-and-a-half and makes them bigger, dumber and louder, and points to a future chock-full of incredibly annoying Fast and Furious movies. The best I can say for Bad Boys is that it birthed a hilarious spoof-slash-appreciation in Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz, even though I’ll never fully understand Wright’s appreciation for Bay’s brand of stultifying overkill.

Our Call: I call SKIP IT on this disgracious lobotomizer of a movie. Granted, a whole bunch of you will STREAM IT and bask in your nostalgic sentiment, but please don’t ask me to join you.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.