Bad Boys (1995)

The Martin Lawrence/ Will Smith police/buddy, action/comedy Bad Boys was the directorial debut of the infamous Michael Bay, it is where the pain began. The movie evidences Bay's real interest in explosions and quick cuts and relative indifference to story and character development. It is a mediocrity in concept that becomes kind of bad in execution. While any number of threads in this film could be explored in relation to how it fails I first have to call out the primary reason it does, that reason is Martin Lawrence. He is awful, his performance is whinny, and unfunny, and tedious and annoying (Will Smith on the other hand is likable, he's always likable, but he wasn't yet a big star and thus is relegated to the secondary lead). Martin Lawrence is so unpleasant and useless on screen that I came to dread whenever he would appear on it, more then once I yelled at him to shut up.

The plot of this movie is just kind of there, as are the set pieces which presumably is what the movie was built around. I don't think 90's action movies date well, I think 80's action movies date better. As action I thought this was a very mediocre movie, as a comedy, I didn't think it was even a comedy. Far too much of the plot is built around a contrivance in which Lawrence has to pretend to be Smith's character, and visa-versa around a witness with a mark on her head played by Téa Leoni, who was the only character here I ever cared about, and then only briefly. There was nothing in this movie for me to latch on to, nothing to care about, nothing to appreciate, nothing good, it was just there. I mean really the best thing I can think of was the set design of a liquor store. While technically competent on a production level Bad Boys is oppressively bland, unfunny and uninteresting, I kind of hated this movie. *