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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!

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