Bad Boys review – 30th anniversary of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence blowing stuff up
The franchise created a bromance for the ages, with this first outing featuring gunfights and wisecracking – and an at-the-time more established Lawrence pulling focusBack in the day when Martin Lawrence had top billing over Will Smith, this movie landed in cinemas in all its gun-wielding, vehicle-exploding, post-shootout-wisecracking humungousness. Now rereleased for its 30th anniversary, it was the first in a franchise featuring the squabblingly bromantic Miami cop partnership, created by screenwriter George Gallo, directed by Michael Bay and produced with towering unsubtlety by the legendary action duo Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, one of their final films before Simpson died of a colossal drug overdose.Lawrence plays Marcus Burnett, a married man with kids, partnered up with Mike Lowrey (Smith), who is supposed to be a single guy and ladies’ man. Oddly for a cop, he’s also supposed to be rich, with family money, which explains his smooth bachelor pad in an art deco apartment building; like so many interiors in this film, it is shot from a low angle in a kind of groovy heat haze, with shafts of sunlight beaming through – this being the signifier for interior design classiness. It is in this flat that the film rather bafflingly contrives some goofy sub-Billy-Wilder comedy as Marcus passes himself off as Mike, leading a material witness into this property for her own protection and pretending that the place is his. Continue reading...
The franchise created a bromance for the ages, with this first outing featuring gunfights and wisecracking – and an at-the-time more established Lawrence pulling focus
Back in the day when Martin Lawrence had top billing over Will Smith, this movie landed in cinemas in all its gun-wielding, vehicle-exploding, post-shootout-wisecracking humungousness. Now rereleased for its 30th anniversary, it was the first in a franchise featuring the squabblingly bromantic Miami cop partnership, created by screenwriter George Gallo, directed by Michael Bay and produced with towering unsubtlety by the legendary action duo Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, one of their final films before Simpson died of a colossal drug overdose.
Lawrence plays Marcus Burnett, a married man with kids, partnered up with Mike Lowrey (Smith), who is supposed to be a single guy and ladies’ man. Oddly for a cop, he’s also supposed to be rich, with family money, which explains his smooth bachelor pad in an art deco apartment building; like so many interiors in this film, it is shot from a low angle in a kind of groovy heat haze, with shafts of sunlight beaming through – this being the signifier for interior design classiness. It is in this flat that the film rather bafflingly contrives some goofy sub-Billy-Wilder comedy as Marcus passes himself off as Mike, leading a material witness into this property for her own protection and pretending that the place is his. Continue reading...
