Viking Night: Bad Boys
By Bruce Hall
May 4, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Most of Bay’s work is an incomprehensible mashup of meaningless dialogue, massive explosions, spontaneous car chases and spastic music video pacing. Even the people who enjoy his movies can rarely tell me what they were about, and often sound puzzled when trying to recall what they liked. So why in the blue hell do people keep handing over their money? Are we stupid? Have we gone collectively insane?
Put your hand down, Hillary.
We all hate these films. We all agree they have no artistic value (trust me, we do). But we keep coming back for the same we keep going back to McDonald's. It’s a revolting experience, chemically formulated to make you want more. They fill a need. They scratch an itch.
In short, they give us what we want. Every time I hit McDonald’s, I quietly mutter “never again” as I pull away from the drive-thru, and I do it with all the somber earnestness of a camera savvy politician touring the field at Gettysburg. But I know I’ll be back, because someday, I’ll be hungry again. Once again, I’ll only have five bucks. And as always, McDonald’s will be there, with their dry, salty meat and weird, spongy bread that does not behave like normal bread over time.
Give them what they want. It applies to movies, as well. I constantly hear people complaining about how sequels are always so bad, because they tend to rehash the original material. That’s weird, because you know which sequels tend to make the most money? The ones that rehash the original material. Snobs like me want diversity in their moviegoing experience. Most everyone else just wants the security of knowing that at the very least, Transformers 12 won’t be any dumber than Transformers 11. At the very least they know it’ll have bigger explosions, and more robots that are shaped like things robots do not need to be shaped like.
It’s what most people want, and nobody understands just how little most people require out of their entertainment than Michael Bay. And...maybe Nickelback.
So welcome, my friends, to Michael Bay May - a celebration of Hollywood’s Crown Prince of Mediocrity.
Have you seen a picture of the guy? Google him. Look at that vile perma-smirk and that defiantly luxurious mane of blonde hair (that conspicuously refuses to gray as he ages). I want to hate him, but it’s not because he’s a bad director. It’s because he’s actually a decent director who is content with his lowest common denominator status simply because it makes money. At the end of the day movies are a business, which means if most of the people involved could choose between making a masterpiece and making a ton of money, the Benjamins always win. Also, according to a lot of people I know, movies are “just entertainment”, which apparently means that they don’t need to “make sense” or “be about anything”. That’s interesting, because I’ve never heard anyone say:
“It’s just a book, Bruce. And books are entertainment. They don’t have to...what was it you said...make sense?”
No. Nobody has ever said that in the history of books, ever. I think the perception exists because movies are easier to watch than books are to read, leading people to subconsciously assume that one is less artistically valid than the other. That is also stupid, but taken to less of an extreme, it’s almost sensible. Not every film (or every book, for that matter) is meant to be taken seriously; certainly not entirely so. But what’s the point of a story that couldn’t be bothered to make any sense to anyone in any way?I’ll never understand it, but I will gladly let Michael Bay explain it with his very first feature film:
Bad Boys!
The first thing that needs to be said about Bad Boys is that on paper, it looks like the worst thing ever made. In fact, Bay himself famously called the original screenplay (reportedly written for Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz) a “piece of shit”. And that was before it was rewritten. AFTER it got punched up, the story went a little something like this:
Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) are Miami-Dade police officers. They are lifelong friends, even though they don’t seem to know much about one another, and we’ll find out later that Burnett has never seen the inside of his partner’s home. Mike also happens to be independently wealthy, for no reason other than it allows him and Marcus to do their jobs in style. There’s no real narrative reason for Mike to drive a Porsche 911, or to dress like he’s just come down from a luxury box at Madison Square Garden.
But it sure does look cool, doesn’t it? Mike’s partner Marcus has a more grounded personality type. This means he is constantly pining after things his job will never let him have, and he dresses the way MC Hammer would look if he joined NWA. If you’re thinking this sounds like a half-baked update of Miami Vice, allow me to point out that “Burnett” was also Don Johnson’s undercover name on that very show. So...yes, Bad Boys is fiercely derivative - but please don’t bother worrying about it just yet. I’m going to go on about it even more in this next paragraph.
Marcus and Mike report to their boss, Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano). Howard is the guy who is always aggressively yelling things like “there’s no sign of forced entry” and “the press will have a field day with this”. That’s because every time Mike and Marcus come back to the office, they discover that their wanton disregard for police regulations is giving the Captain fits. In fact if they’re not careful, they’re going to find themselves busted back down to beat cops! Shenanigans!
You might think this would keep them from getting any of the plum cop assignments, but you’d be wrong. Yes, they’re a pair of loose cannons. But it’s their recklessness that makes them the best, you see! So when a daring heist puts their jobs at risk for real, they are put to the test. But so is Michael Bay. Bad Boys was a dumpster fire waiting to happen. To save it, Michael Bay pulls off a cinematic sleight of hand so ingenious and bold that I find myself almost blind with reverence.
So, remember a moment ago when we discussed our and how boring and obvious our heroes are? Well, their nemesis is a similarly improbable/forgettable person named Fouchet (Tchéky Karyo). We know he’s evil because of his fancy sounding name, his slick European accent, and the way he gleefully murders one of his idiot henchmen at the beginning of the film (good leaders only hire idiots). This sets Fouchet’s diabolically crafted scheme into motion. In minutes, the Miami police are facing the greatest challenge of their existence.
And what is Fouchet’s big plan?
Apparently if you call 911 and say “officer down”, the nearest police station will completely empty itself of cops as they all run around in circles looking for their wounded friend. They will leave the building completely unattended (obviously), allowing you and your henchmen to stroll in and rob the big silver bank safe all police stations have on the back wall. Then, you stroll back out with all the drugs in the world. The police will have no idea how to find you, because their idea of security is less inventive than the “no girls allowed” sign you had on your tree fort when you were little.
Howard is informed that he has [insert arbitrary period of time here] days to retrieve the drugs, or the whole division will be shut down. That’s right - they’re not going to just punish the idiot who gave the order to leave a building full of drugs empty and unguarded in the middle of an emergency. No, they’re going to reassign every cop in the division and close it, after which I guess everyone living in the surrounding neighborhoods can go screw themselves. Obviously this makes no sense; it’s just a lazy plot device designed to introduce a “ticking clock” to the story.
The rest of the plot isn’t much more original. I’d like to say that Fouchet is some kind of master criminal with a larger, Hans Gruber-style game plan in his back pocket. I’d also like to say that he and our titular Bad Boys engage in a thrilling game of cat and mouse, dancing on a razor’s edge to the pulse pounding beats of 1995’s hottest soundtrack. Sadly, I cannot (although the soundtrack is actually not half bad). What we have instead is the kind of thing they might really have done on Miami Vice...during a strike shortened season when the producers gave their their kids SAG cards and let them write a few episodes.
Fouchet and his gang are repeatedly referred to as “professionals who know what they’re doing”, because that is something that must be said in every cop movie. But for these clowns, no amount of police acumen is really required to pick up their trail. Fouchet is a typical movie villain who only hires incompetent dipshits. None of these morons would last a full episode of Reno 911, and it’s only the staggering incompetence of Howard’s department that allows them to remain free as long as they do. Maybe it sounds like I’m nitpicking, but I can’t be the only one who thinks that Bad Boys feels as though there was no script, and everyone on screen was just making up the story as they went along.
At one point in the movie, Will Smith enters an already crowded crime scene, carefully picks up a glass from a table, spots lipstick on it, and brilliantly concludes that a woman may have been drinking out of it. Moments later they notice her lying dead, dramatically smashed through a glass table about three goddamn feet away.
The scene is NOT meant to be played for laughs, but it’s so incompetently staged that it’s actually too stupid to be funny. I swear on the Ark of the Covenant that I’m not exaggerating when I say “Bad Boys is horribly written”. I’ve already told you that Bay himself felt this way, which is why Lawrence and Smith were famously encouraged to improvise on set. While the results don’t exactly put Second City to shame, it was needed, and it does help. Watching Martin and the Fresh Prince pointlessly bicker like teenage girls every five minutes is...mildly amusing.
For about...fifteen minutes.
But watching them do it as they get into cheap looking gunfights and unconvincing car chases with the dumbest criminals in history? That my friends, is the perfect diversion from what, technically, isn’t even a complete story. At the time Michael Bay was given this abomination of a script, his grandest achievement had been making a music video for Meat Loaf. But we’re talking about a story originally written for the Church Lady and Opera Man. It really would have been easier to chuck the whole thing and find a better script.
But back in 1995 a certain brilliantly coiffed, up-and-coming young director would have smirked on just one side of his mouth and said: “Not on my watch.”
Who needs to spend a weekend hunting down a new script (buddy cop movies are a dime a dozen)? With mere months of expensive, elaborate preparation and execution, you can easily distract your audience from your pedestrian efforts. I call it the “Krispy Kreme” approach, because it’s really all about the glaze.
For his leads, Bay ditched the SNL alums and did the complete opposite of what Lorne Michaels would do, meaning he cast two black males (har). He filmed the day scenes through obnoxious yellow and blue filters. He peppered the most confusing parts of the story with random car chases and curiously inexpensive looking explosions. Finally, he filmed all the night scenes on wet pavement with backlit fog, just like a Whitesnake video. At this point, I imagined he stopped to gaze at himself in a full length mirror (presumably trimmed in gold leaf and held by two female assistants) before declaring:
“By the time I’m through, they won’t even know there was a fucking story.”
I still think it would have been easier to just dig up a stronger script. But while that might have made for a better film, it might not have made $141 million worldwide against a budget of $22 million. If you’ve ever asked yourself why they keep letting Michael Bay make movies, there’s your answer. Money, money, and more money. As long as his films bring in that kind of scratch, they will let him make movies about whatever the hell he wants.
Like most of Bay’s films, Bad Boys isn’t really about anything. But the man learned his craft at the feet of super producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, legendary purveyors of easily digestible action flicks like Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun and Crimson Tide. The three of them almost single handedly pioneered the “fuck the story; nobody in China speaks English anyway” school of filmmaking that has swept through the industry over the last thirty years.
What I’m saying is, Michael Bay is personally responsible for your unending diet of bland, but wildly profitable summer blockbusters. You’re welcome.
Also, there’s no Santa Claus because Nickelback murdered him.
Happy Michael Bay May, everyone!