Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in Bad Boys II Photo: Alamy
Of all the box office successes and flops this summer, none is worth examining more closely than Bad Boys: Ride or Die, which storms into UK cinemas this weekend. Not because its status as the fourth in a series of loud, violent and occasionally funny cop thrillers makes it stand out as something particularly extraordinary in the year’s film list, but because of its star, Will Smith.
With all due respect to his co-star Martin Lawrence, who seems grateful for the attention these films give him, Smith has always been the MVP of the Bad Boys series. He was a rising star in 1995 when the first film was made, a major star in 2003 when the first sequel arrived, and has continued to rank at the top of Hollywood.
At least until the infamous slap at the 2022 Oscars, when Smith took to the podium uninvited to attack Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith's alopecia. He then decided to yell at Rock from his seat to “get my wife's name out of your fucking mouth!” and then, as the audience's initial amusement turned to horror, when it became clear that Smith and Rock had not dreamed up the moment as some kind of subversive joke, the consequences began quickly.
Although the initial affection belonged to Smith, who moments later duly walked up to accept his Academy Award for Best Actor, the feeling soon dissipated and Smith was subsequently banned from the Academy and all related events for a decade. It appears to have joined the ranks of the canceled in an impressive and unexpected way; a once brilliant career seemed to end in a matter of seconds, and as publicly as imaginable.
Will Smith in Bad Boys: Ride or Die Credits: AP
Before that, Smith occupied a nearly unique position in Hollywood. While his colleague and occasional mentor Denzel Washington—who on the night of the attack wisely told him, “When it matters most, be careful, because that’s when the devil will come for you”—had forged a varied, artistically satisfying, critically acclaimed career with the occasional blockbuster, Smith quickly established himself as the African-American equivalent of Tom Cruise, a four-quadrant actor whose films were designed to reach as wide an audience as possible. After making a name for himself on the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and as an actual rapper, he proved his acting bona fides in the drama Six Degrees Apart, then established himself as a bankable star in the first Bad Boys film.
The picture, originally conceived as a vehicle for comedians Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey, was derivative of countless other cop comedies and poorly written, but the spirited partnership of Smith and Lawrence and the unfettered excess of debutant director Michael Bay made it a big hit. Filmed on a relatively tight budget of $19 million, Bay's cinematic know-how, honed by years of making music videos and commercials, made it look much more expensive than it actually was, and the film grossed $141 million.
Smith's star rose and he appeared in three of the biggest hits of the nineties: Independence Day, Men in Black and, by far the best of them all, the paranoid thriller Enemy of the State. Even the failed sci-fi western comedy Wild Wild West couldn't dampen Smith's brilliance; his next film, Michael Mann's Muhammad Ali biopic (2001), earned him his first Oscar nomination, even though it was a commercial disappointment.
So the circumstances under which Bad Boys 2 came together were unconventional. Bay had huge success with the 1996 Sean Connery/Nicolas Cage action film The Rock and the 1998 asteroid epic Armageddon, but failed with his 2001 World War II film Pearl Harbor. Intended to be Bay's Titanic, it was panned by critics and performed poorly at the box office, grossing less than Ocean's 11 and Shrek. So Bay and Smith both needed a bona fide commercial hit, and Lawrence, who had achieved his own success with the 2000 cross-dressing crime series Big Momma's House, now wanted to be taken more seriously as an equal partner, and not as a comic character. .
Although a Bad Boys sequel had been discussed since the success of the original, the combination of Smith and Bay's other involvement and problems getting the script right meant that production was continually delayed. Shortly after the events of 9/11, the film was finally greenlit and a number of screenwriters were brought in to rewrite the film to the specifications of Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Smith refused to sign the contract two weeks before filming began because he was unhappy with the script, and so his demands also had to be met.
Just as The Rock and Armageddon featured a distinguished parade of screenwriters that included Aaron Sorkin, Quentin Tarantino and JJ Abrams, respectively, Bad Boys 2 featured everyone from director Bull Durham ” Ron Shelton to British sitcom veterans Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement. brought in primarily to give the film a flavor of humor.
Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in the movie “Bad Boys 2” Photo: Alamy
One of those writers was 40-year-old Virgin mastermind Judd Apatow, who in turn gave his protégés Seth Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg the opportunity to pepper the film with a few jokes. Rogen announced this on Twitter in 2020. “Judd was rewriting it and Evan and I were broke, so he gave us some money to help,” he said. “I don’t remember much, but we all definitely wrote a joke where we don’t know the words to the song and where Martin accidentally shoots a machine gun in the car. And perhaps many others…”
Production on the film was relatively quiet, taking place over six months in the second half of 2002, and allowed Bay to put together the large-scale action sequences for which he was synonymous. The plot of Bad Boys II (Smith and Lawrence must fight drug dealers who are bringing a particularly potent strain of ecstasy into Miami) was a lazy afterthought and did little other than tie together stock elements executed with Bay's usual mixture of over-excitement. and arrogance.
Another note of controversy arose over the presence of then 15-year-old Megan Fox as a bikini dancer twirling under a waterfall on a club stage. Fox, who appeared in Bay's subsequent Transformers films, could not be filmed drinking an alcoholic drink because she was underage, so later commented that Bay “solved that problem by making me dance under a waterfall while soaking wet” and sardonically remarked: “At 15! I was in 10th grade. It's kind of a microcosm of how Bay's mind works.” However, she also called it “inconsequential” and noted, “In terms of my direct experiences with Michael… I was never attacked or harassed in anything that I thought was sexual.”
When the film was released, it was indeed the big hit Bay and Smith had hoped for, grossing $273 million worldwide. However, the ingenuity of the original was now missing, as the budget was significantly higher at $130 million, meaning the director could do whatever he wanted. The results were unprecedented, for good and ill.
Revisited two decades after its original release, we see action sequences of astonishing complexity and verve that Bay and other directors have since emulated, including a manic freeway chase in which Smith and Lawrence have to dodge cars—and a speedboat! – being literally thrown at them, it packs a visceral punch that no amount of special effects could ever recreate.
Thanks to an endless parade of talented and highly paid screenwriters, some of the jokes are funny, including Rogen's contribution to an early scene in which, after ambushing a group of KKK drug addicts, Smith and Lawrence begin triumphantly singing their “Bad Boys” theme song – originally written in 1987 Jamaican reggae band Inner Circle – only to forget the words and start picking on each other.
Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union and Will Smith in the film “Bad Boys 2” Photo: Alamy
Against this backdrop, much of the film remains borderline unwatchable, and can now be seen as heralding the beginning of the dark side that would emerge in Smith, both as a man and as an actor, throughout the second half of his career. It's perhaps not for nothing that the disgraced Sean Combs has a distinguished reputation as an “executive music consultant”; The film revels in misogyny and tasteless violence throughout its lengthy 148-minute runtime. A typical exchange of dialogue consists of one character announcing some new horror: “This is some disgusting shit!” and another accurately saying: “It's going to get worse!”
This is true for everything from another car chase, in which our heroes are attacked this time by corpses rather than cars, to scenes of homophobia and sexism that wouldn't be out of place in a seventies British sitcom. The female characters are smirkingly objectified – even Gabrielle Union as Lawrence's sister and love interest Smith, an alleged undercover DEA agent, is sent to bikinis ASAP – and there is a constant plot of gay panic.
In the first scene, Smith mistakenly shoots Lawrence in the buttocks; This is then discussed later in a candid conversation between the two men at a hardware store where, thanks to their conversation being accidentally broadcast to other customers, it appears that the two are in an abusive sexual relationship with Smith. , naturally, as the dominant partner.
It's easy to list the film's shortcomings and problems, which range from simple bad taste – it's hard to think of many big-budget pictures that included scenes of rodents copulating for cheap laughs – to a reactionary, flag-waving sensibility that can clearly be linked to a post-9/11 desire for strength and conservatism. ranked first in America. (This, like much of Bay and Bruckheimer's work, was mercilessly satirized in Matt Stone and Trey Parker's 2004 comedy “Squad America: World Police,” with its stirring title song “America, F___ Yeah.”)
< p>The film ends, oddly enough, in Guantanamo Bay, which is portrayed as a bastion of American integrity while Cuban drug traffickers are shown to be nothing more than sweaty, corrupt idiots who deserve to be gunned down by the dozens.
For the avoidance of doubt, Bad Boys II is a deeply idiosyncratic film. It's not hard to imagine that at some point in the future historians will look at it less as a brainless action comedy and more as evidence of how decadent American society had become at the turn of the millennium, and wonder what this expensive exercise in garish bad taste could be produced, sold and consumed by the citizens of a country as entertainment. But in terms of sheer amount of action, no mainstream Hollywood film has topped it.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in Bad guys 2″ Photo: Alamy
Whether out of repentance or guilt, Smith spent the years following the film's release appearing in dark and gritty dramas such as Seven Pounds and I Am Legend, often showing his character making sacrifices yourself for the good of humanity. Even the third Men in Black film turned out to be much darker than the other two. As his star waned, Smith's personal life became a topic of debate and rumor, and when Pinkett Smith revealed that they had been living apart since 2016, although they remained married, it seemed to confirm that this was far from an all-American success story. Smith was as complex, tortured, and conflicted as any 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 which featured Smith's character's ex-lover and his son as the film's main villains, was also by far the most critically acclaimed of the trio. as the top-grossing film, earning $426 million worldwide, just before theaters closed due to Covid. He abandoned the vicious objectification of the first two films in favor of an element of moral complexity that allowed Smith to act rather than just preen, which suited him much better. What is characteristic is that now he was in the project not only as an actor, but also as a producer.
It was supposed to mark a career comeback of sorts, but then an Oscar slap put it all in jeopardy. The only film he produced subsequently, Antoine Fuqua's slave escape drama Emancipation, was a failure; “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” will be a referendum on whether Smith is allowed to continue his career as a star player. Still, even if it is the biggest hit of the year and Smith returns to the love of the world, he must look back at the strange, deeply unpleasant picture he made just over two decades ago and wonder what made everyone participants to reveal their inner selves completely publicly.
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