Tasteless, offensive and often astonishing, Michael Bay's deranged sequel turned its star from clean-cut Fresh Prince to bad boy overnight
Of all this summer's box office successes and flops, none are going to be more closely scrutinised than Bad Boys: Ride or Die, which thuds into British cinemas this weekend. Not because its status as the fourth in a series of loud, violent and occasionally funny cop action-thrillers marks it out as anything especially extraordinary in the year's roster of films, but because of its star Will Smith.
With all due respect to his co-star Martin Lawrence, who is presumably grateful for the exposure that these films give him, Smith has always been the MVP of the Bad Boys series. He was an emerging star in 1995, when the first one was made, a major one in 2003 when the first sequel appeared, and has continued to occupy a place at the top of Hollywood.
That is, at least, until the notorious Oscars slap of 2022, when Smith strode uninvited onto the podium to assault Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith's alopecia. He then decided to shout at Rock from his seat to "keep my wife's name out your f______ mouth!" and then, as the audience's initial amusement turned to horror as it became clear that Smith and Rock had not cooked up the moment as some subversive skit, the fallout swiftly began.
Although initial sympathy lay with Smith, who duly walked up to collect his Academy Award for Best Actor a few moments later, this feeling soon dissipated and Smith was subsequently banned from the Academy and all related events for a decade. He appeared to have joined the ranks of the cancelled in spectacular, unanticipated fashion; a once-glittering A-list career seemed to have ended in a matter of seconds, as publicly as imaginable.
Until then, Smith occupied an almost unique position in Hollywood. While his peer and occasional mentor Denzel Washington - who, on the night of the assault, sagely said to him "At your highest moment, be careful, that's when the devil comes for you" - has pursued an artistically satisfying and critically acclaimed career diversified by the occasional blockbuster, Smith swiftly established himself as little less than the African-American equivalent of Tom Cruise, a four-quadrant actor whose films were intended to reach as wide an audience as possible. After making his name in the sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and as a clean-cut rapper, he proved his thespian bona fides in the drama Six Degrees of Separation before establishing himself as a bankable star in the first Bad Boys film.
The picture, which had originally been intended as a vehicle for the comedians Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey, was derivative of countless other cop action-comedies and poorly scripted, but the energetic partnership of Smith and Lawrence and the no-holds-barred excess of debut director Michael Bay made it a big hit. Filmed on a relatively shoestring budget of $19 million, Bay's cinematic know-how, honed from years of making music videos and adverts, made it look far more expensive than it was, and the film grossed $141 million at the box office.
Smith's star went into the ascendant, and he appeared in three of the biggest hits of the Nineties: Independence Day, Men in Black and, by far the best of them, the paranoid thriller Enemy of the State. Even the flop western sci-fi comedy Wild Wild West could not dent Smith's lustre; his next film, Michael Mann's 2001 Muhammad Ali biopic, saw him secure his first Oscar nomination, even if it was a commercial disappointment.
The circumstances under which Bad Boys II came together, then, were unorthodox. Bay had had enormous success with the 1996 Sean Connery-Nicolas Cage action film The Rock and the 1998 asteroid epic Armageddon, but had stumbled badly with his 2001 Second World War picture Pearl Harbor. Intended to be nothing less than Bay's Titanic, it was critically reviled and underperformed at the box office, grossing less than Ocean's 11 and Shrek. Therefore, Bay and Smith both needed a bona fide commercial hit, and Lawrence, who had had his own success with 2000's cross-dressing crime caper Big Momma's House, now wished to be taken more seriously as an equal partner, rather than the comic relief.
Although a Bad Boys sequel had been mooted ever since the original's success, a combination of Smith and Bay being otherwise engaged and problems with getting the script right meant that production was continually delayed. Shortly after 9/11, the film was finally greenlit and an eclectic range of screenwriters were brought on board to rewrite the picture to Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer's specifications. Smith refused to sign on until a fortnight before production began, as he was dissatisfied with the script, and so his demands had to be catered for, too.
Just as The Rock and Armageddon had featured a distinguished parade of script doctors who included, respectively, Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino and JJ Abrams, so Bad Boys II saw everyone from Bull Durham director Ron Shelton to British sitcom veterans Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement brought on board, primarily to give the film an influx of humour.
One of these writers was 40-Year-Old Virgin mastermind Judd Apatow, who in turn gave his proteges Seth Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg the chance to scatter the film with a few jokes. Rogen revealed this on Twitter in 2020. "Judd was rewriting it and me and Evan were broke so he gave us a bit of money to help," he said. "I don't remember much but we all definitely wrote the joke where they don't know the words to the song, and where Martin shoots the machine gun in the car by accident. And probably many more..."
The film's production was relatively uneventful, taking place over six months in the second half of 2002 and allowing Bay to put together the large-scale action scenes with which he was synonymous. Bad Boys II's plot - Smith and Lawrence must battle drug dealers who are importing an extra-strength variety of ecstasy into Miami - was a lazy afterthought, and did little than to string together set-pieces, executed with Bay's usual blend of over-excitement and chutzpah.
One subsequent note of controversy arose from the presence of the then-15-year-old Megan Fox as a bikini-clad dancer, gyrating under a waterfall in a club scene. Fox, who appeared in Bay's subsequent Transformer films, could not have been filmed holding an alcoholic drink as she was underage, so later commented that Bay's "solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet", and sardonically observed "At 15! I was in 10th grade. That's kind of a microcosm of how Bay's mind works." Nonetheless, she also called it "inconsequential" and remarked that "When it comes to my direct experiences with Michael...I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner."
When the film was released, it was, indeed, the big hit that Bay and Smith had hoped for, grossing $273 million worldwide. Nevertheless, the ingenuity that had gone into the original was now absent, as the budget was massively higher at $130 million, meaning that its director could do what he liked. The results were unparalleled, both for good and for ill.
Rewatched two decades after its initial release, there are action scenes of astonishing complexity and verve that Bay, and other directors, have ripped off ever since, including a manic motorway chase in which Smith and Lawrence have to dodge automobiles - and a speedboat! - being literally thrown at them, it has a visceral punch that no amount of special effects could ever hope to recreate.
Thanks to the endless parade of talented and highly paid screenwriters, some of the jokes are hilarious, including Rogen's contribution to an early scene in which, ambushing a group of KKK drug fiends, Smith and Lawrence begin triumphantly singing their Bad Boys theme song - originally written in 1987 by the Jamaican reggae band Inner Circle - only to forget the words and start quibbling with one another.
Set against this, much of the film remains borderline unwatchable, and can now be seen as heralding the beginning of the dark side that emerged within Smith as both a man and an actor throughout the second half of his career. It is, perhaps, not for nothing that the disgraced Sean Combs is given a prominent credit as "executive music consultant"; the film revels in misogyny and tasteless violence throughout its overlong 148-minute running time. A typical exchange of dialogue has one character announcing, of some fresh horror, "This is some sick s___!", only for another to say, accurately, "It's about to get sicker!"
This is typified by everything from another car chase, in which, this time, our heroes are assaulted by corpses rather than cars, to scenes of homophobia and sexism that would not have been out of place in a British sitcom from the Seventies. Female characters are leeringly objectified - even Gabrielle Union as Lawrence's sister and Smith's love interest, a supposed DEA undercover agent, is sent into a bikini as soon as possible - and there is an ongoing subplot of gay panic.
In the opening scene, Smith shoots Lawrence in the buttocks by mistake; this is then brought up later in a heart-to-heart between the two men in a technology store where, thanks to their conversation being accidentally broadcast to the other patrons, the two seem as if they are in an abusive sexual relationship, with Smith, naturally, as the dominant partner.
It is easy to list the film's faults and problems, which range from mere tastelessness - it is hard to think of many big-budget pictures that would include scenes of rodents copulating for a cheap laugh - to a reactionary, flag-waving sensibility that can clearly be tied to a post-9/11 desire for America-first strength and conservatism. (It, as well as much of the oeuvre of Bay and Bruckheimer, would be mocked mercilessly in Matt Stone and Trey Parker's 2004 comedy Team America: World Police, with its stirring theme song America, F___ Yeah.)
The film's conclusion comes at, of all places, Guantanamo Bay, which is portrayed as a stronghold of American integrity, while the Cuban drug dealing villains are shown as little other than sweaty, venal imbeciles who deserve to be shot and killed in their dozens.
For the avoidance of doubt, Bad Boys II is a deeply peculiar film. It is not hard to imagine, at some point in the future, historians watching it less as a brainless action comedy and more as an indication of how decadent a society America had become by the turn of the millennium, and marvel that this exercise in expensive, flashy tastelessness could be made, marketed and consumed by the country's citizens as entertainment. But in terms of sheer action excess, no mainstream Hollywood film has topped it.
Whether out of penance or guilt, Smith spent several years after the film's release appearing in grim and downbeat dramas like Seven Pounds and I Am Legend, often featuring his character sacrificing himself for the good of humanity. Even the third Men in Black film was considerably darker than the other two. As his star waned, Smith's personal life became the topic of discussion and rumour, and when Pinkett Smith revealed that they had lived separate existences since 2016 - although remained married - it seemed to confirm that, far from being an all-American success story, Smith was as complex, tormented and contradictory as any other A-list celebrity who pretends to be someone else for a living.
Ironically, the third Bad Boys film, which was not directed by Bay and had the plot twist that the film's central villains were, respectively, the Smith character's former lover and his son, was by far the most critically acclaimed of the trio, as well as the highest-grossing, earning $426 million worldwide, shortly before cinemas were shut down with Covid. It abandoned the leering objectification of the first two pictures in favour of an element of moral complexity that allowed Smith to act, rather than simply preen, which suited him far better. Perhaps tellingly, he was now on board as a producer, as well as an actor.
It should have heralded a career comeback of sorts, but then the Oscars slap placed all that in jeopardy. The only film that he has released subsequently, Antoine Fuqua's slave escape drama Emancipation, was unsuccessful; Bad Boys: Ride or Die will be the referendum on whether Smith is allowed to continue his career as an A-lister. Yet even if it's the biggest hit of the year, and Smith once again returns to the world's affection, he must look back on the strange, deeply unpleasant picture he made just over two decades ago, and wonder what on earth possessed everyone involved to reveal their inner selves quite so publicly.
