I've only been to Miami once but it was just like this.
I really, really wanted to like this more. I had been saving it for years for the right moment. All of my most trusted advisors had been recommending it for years so I put it behind glass, to be broken out only for a special occasion. And unfortunately, it did not live up to the hype.
I think if every scene in this movie were cut down by a couple minutes, I’d be absolutely in love. And I know that’s contradictory to its essence, the maximalist, leave it all out there, over the top nonsense that Michael Bay is self parodying at this point, but I do think there is such thing as too much cool shit. It’s kinda like how if you ate a really nice steak everyday it’d be good for like 2 days, then you’d wanna die. It’s the same principle at play here, for example, I love the Haitian chase scene in the beginning. But do you really need to drop all 6 cars of the transport truck? Does every single explosion need 4 angles? By cutting and cutting and cutting you begin to really lose your sense of place, it feels a bit like watching the movie from the inside of a tumbling washing machine.
I love gratuity as much as the next guy, but at some point, even the most strung out addicts need a pause between highs or you’re just going to pass out. I’m not saying that I didn’t like it, but by the time I got to the final shootout I felt like I had been watching this movie for 4 hours.
All that said, Will Smith is in peak form here, with certified good actors like Joey Pants, Micheal Shannon and Peter Stormare lurking in the shadows you really recognize how lacking some of the performances are leading up to the shining beacon that is Will Smith. He’s funnier in this than probably anything else he’s done, he’s athletic, charming and, most importantly, he can act, unburdened by the decades long history that hangs off of him now (a bear trap that includes the entirety of The Church of Scientology and a ban from the Oscars). I miss Will, I’ll say it every chance I get.
If you made it this far looking for a more concise summation of my feelings about Bad Boys II I’ll leave you with this. Micheal Bay desperately needs a good editor and someone to write his dialogue or you end up with a 17 year old boys masturbatory bro-dream pro-military power fantasy, for better and for worse.
Oh and yeah, I laughed when the two rats fucked….. And every time someone talked about their penis.
Inside me there are two wolves.
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