Baa Boys

Noel Vera

Okay.

The deal went something like this: two movies were opening this
week: Hideo Nakata's "Dark Water" and Michael Bay's "Bad Boys 2."
For reasons too complicated to cite here, I didn't see the Nakata,
and I'm stuck with the Bay, all hundred and forty-six minutes of it,
in Dolby Sound. Now I've got to write about the movie, and set
myself a target: a thousand words on why I hate this picture. Ever
been in that situation in grade school?

Eighty-three, eighty-four. Nine hundred sixteen words to go…

It's a Jerry Bruckheimer production of a Michael Bay film, though
the late producer Don Simpson's name is seen in the opening credits
(frankly, I don't see much of a difference in the final product with
or without him); with Bruckheimer and Bay involved, and invoking
Simpson along the way, it's reasonable to assume that subtle acting
and understated storytelling will not be the order of the day--will,
in fact, be the only things not served up in upgraded Mega-Biggie-
Giant-sized servings. Just about everything else is, from shot-in-
the-ass jokes to vomit jokes to necrophilia jokes, a veritable
cornucopia of gags guaranteed to induce the same (gag, I mean) in
one or another member of the audience. Throw over that some
oversized action sequences that look put together Tinker-Toy style
by an eight-year-old with a Steadicam, trained in the Black and
Decker School of Food Processing--sorry, Film Editing--and over that
an extra large helping of industrial-strength male-bonding
sentiment, and we're talking one seriously enormous, steaming pile
of--but I get ahead of myself.

There's a plot in here somewhere, if you care to look for it (in my
case, I had nothing else to do BUT look for it): a huge shipment of
Ecstasy is being smuggled into Miami inside dead bodies, and Cuban
gangsters are muscling out Russian mafia gangsters from the
operation; meantime, Detective Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) has
had enough with Mike Lowrey (Will Smith--at least I assume the
taller one's Smith); he wants to transfer somewhere else, but hasn't
had the heart to tell Lowrey; meantime (a lot of meantimes in this
movie) Mike has fallen in love with Marcus' sister Theresa (Theresa
Randle), who's an undercover cop for the DEA handling the same case,
and hasn't had the guts to tell Marcus (that he fell in love. With
his sister, I mean).

The fairly complicated plot is perhaps the result of four people
roped in to help write the picture; you see the effort, but what's
missing is the overall intelligence--the storytelling sensibility--
to whip all the pages of dialogue and character sketches and jokes
into something resembling an actual narrative arc. It's like they
tied up all four people to chairs with typewriters up front inside
some warehouse, and a hulking thug with a baseball bat paced up and
down before them, occasionally delivering tremendous whacks to the
knees and yelling: "Dumber! I want something dumber and more
senseless! Or I stop being nice, you hear?" Ron Shelton, veteran of
various very-good-to-decent sports films ("Bull Durham," "White Men
Can't Jump") is listed, but damned if I can see his contribution
(he's credited with providing "story").

Bruckheimer also produced the long (though shorter by eleven
minutes) and at first glance equally senseless "Pirates of the
Caribbean," inspired by the most elaborate (and wimpiest) of
Disneyland rides; surprise, surprise, that was actually entertaining-
-first, because it's a change to see action sequences that don't
depend on semiautomatic weaponry and cars and gasoline explosions,
second because of the presence of Johnny Depp, who plays pirate as
if he were Katherine Hepburn from "Long Day's Journey into Night"
suddenly projected into "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Depp sustains the
magic act for a remarkable hundred-forty-plus minutes, and keeps us
watching long after we should've nodded off; every time the pacing
sags or the inventiveness wear thin (which is often), Depp appears
with delicately fluttering hands and outrageously mascaraed eyes and
minces away with the picture.

There's nothing as interesting going on in this movie. Oh, Mike and
Marcus have this bantering relationship between domesticated family
man and arrogant daredevil--but that was tired since the "Lethal
Weapon" movies (produced, incidentally, by Bruckheimer rival Joel
Silver). Mainstream critics have complained about the gross jokes
(the boys sinking their arms into corpses), gay jokes (Mike and
Marcus sharing a private moment monitored by videocam), and sadistic
jokes (Roger Ebert singles out a scene where the two terrorize an
innocent youth out to date Marcus' daughter); I can't help finding
some jokes funny (Mike leeringly asks the boy if he's ever slept
with a man, then asks if he wants to), but I suspect the general
disapproval isn't provoked so much by the tastelessness of the jokes
("Beavis and Butthead," "South Park" and Tom Green have pushed the
enveloped far further) as by the sheer witlessness of their use: the
setup is often laborious, the execution clumsy, the follow-up
nonexistent. Break taboos, if you must--that's admittedly a
challenge in itself nowadays--but not to so little comic effect!

And when you think about it, when you lay your cards down and cut to
the literal chase, these "Bad Boys" are really wimps, the movie
ultimately a benign poseur, with little at stake. You want bad, try,
say, John Woo's Hong Kong action flicks--in "Hard Boiled," Chow Yun
Fat's police officer kills a fellow cop; in "The Killer," Andrew
Lau's cop is as bloodthirsty as the assassin he chases. They're
awful, ambiguous figures in the bullet-ridden landscape, but what
makes them magnetic isn't the fury they unleash but the friendships
they form--Fat develops an intense concern towards an undercover cop
he uncovers, and Lau eventually bonds with the assassin, literally
over a pile of bloody corpses. You end up identifying with, caring
for these people, in a way you never do for any of Bay's characters--
or his films, for that matter. Ninety nine, one thousand; I think
I'll stop now.

(Comments? Email noelbotevera@...)