Nearly two whole decades intervened between Michael Bay’s Bad Boys II and Adil & Bilall’s agreeable Bad Boys for Life, from 2020. It has taken a mere four years for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence to return, but, given what happened in the interim, it may as well have been 10 times as long.
Bad Boys for Life, a surprisingly disciplined exercise in cartoon pandemonium, ended up as the highest-grossing American title of the movie business’s most asterisked year. That footnote, of course, explains that a month or two after the film’s release the whole world shut down.
Will Smith’s (perhaps literally) jaw-dropping swing at Chris Rock during the 2022 Oscars was, in historical terms, of no consequence, but the industry, welcoming his first big release to be shot after that incident, will be eager to discover how robust the brand remains.
He looks all right. He can still twinkle. The face may be a bit fleshier, but the limbs still seem taught. It is, unsurprisingly, Lawrence who gets to do most of the “I’m getting too old for this shit” stuff in yet another dying-of-the-light franchise entry. (Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F will be with you in just a few weeks.)
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Detective Mike and Detective Miles – that’s Will and Martin – are still on the Miami beat and still burning up the highway in vehicles no ordinary garda could easily afford. Early on, Miles suffers a medical incident, passes briefly into the next world and returns to find himself banned from eating certain proprietary snack foods whose names are brandished with lucrative abandon.
When an investigation into corruption looks to implicate the late Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano returns in ghostly form), the boys get on all available high horses and ride recklessly towards the echoing gunfire. Discerning even this much plot from the array of martial chaos requires the closest concentration. Bad Boys for Life was not exactly a model of lucidity, but Adil & Bilall – Belgian wunderkinds with an addiction to flash – did manage to keep the narrative at a steady trot. They have since lost the metronome.
The new film places a huge array of brash, unlikable characters in a giant biscuit tin, shakes it until their heads crack and flings them towards garishly lit permanent nightmare. Vanessa Hudgens is now the boss. Ioan Gruffudd is a sinister kingpin. Tiffany Haddish just about retains her dignity in a vulgar role that asks insultingly little of her. And so on.
We have been comparing films unfavourably to video games for 30 years or so. It is old hat. But Bad Boys: Ride or Die simply demands that we drag out the parallel one more time. Most of the interactions with villains play eerily like cut scenes from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (a game that may have owed a little to the original 1995 Bad Boys). Late on, a first-person sequence seems to take us back to the visuals of Doom or Wolfenstein.
The downside to all this is that it reminds us that video games tend to manage cleaner storytelling than the makers of Bad Boys: Ride or Die do. The film plays as a muddle of set pieces – some impressive, most unintelligible – that fail to form any kind of coherent line. One almost longs for Bay’s return. His satanic mayhem at least had a consistency to it.
At the eye of all this, Lawrence and Smith muddle along reasonably effectively. Lawrence is permitted to puff and wheeze like a man who’s nearly 60. Smith, a few years younger, hasn’t trimmed the performance much – still metaphorically freewheeling his bike with one finger hooked around the back of a trundling streetcar. He’d want to watch it. The bruises don’t heal as they once did.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is in cinemas from Wednesday, June 5th
