Film Review: Bad Boys for Life – 6/10

‘Do you want your legacy to be muscle shirts and body counts?

Bad Boys has a lot to answer for. It launched the career of much derided director Michael Bay, as well as establishing Will Smith as a Hollywood leading man (Independence Day would follow just a year later). Whether either of these two events are to be celebrated is up for debate, but there is no denying that the first Bad Boys movie is genuinely thrilling, genuinely funny with both Smith and Bay operating something close to their respective peaks. While Bay’s debut feature was undoubtedly a huge cultural event back in 1995, would Mike Lowery and Marcus Burnett still have anything interesting to say 25 years later?

You know the drill. Mike (Smith) is still stumbling through life, kicking ass and taking names. Marcus (Martin Lawrence) is on board for one last job. And both of them truly are too old for this shit to paraphrase a buddy cop franchise that always worked better than this one did. This time, a mother-and-son pair of drug lords are gunning people down on the streets of Miami. Our heroes must work together one last time to overcome this mysterious evil.

So, I guess the first thing this film needed to do was to justify its own existence. Is their a need to revisit these characters over two decades later? I think there is. This was never a sacred franchise to begin with despite the commercial success of the first two entries. The Bad Boys movies were always meant to be fluff. Popcorn flicks. Multiplex fare. And there is nothing wrong with that. If anything, it ensures that this franchise was ripe for a revival. Nobody is going to be concerned with ruining the sanctity of the source material because that was never much of a thing in the first place.

Wisely, new directors Adel El Arbi and Billall Fallah (whom I will confess that I know nothing about) don’t mess with a winning formula. Smith and Lawrence are front and centre, and as ever, it is their lightning-in-a-bottle energy that keeps things moving along. There are missteps here, however. The third act is, quite frankly, preposterous. And not in a John McClane firing a car into a helicopter fun way. No film in the Bad Boys franchise needs to feature a witch. That feels like a given. Aside from that instance of overreach, Bad Boys for Life is mostly successful, despite the nagging feeling that Smith and Lawrence are having more fun than the audience.

Bad Boys for Life is mostly entertaining, and works well as a reboot of an aging franchise, but it’s also too long and loses its way in the third act. Strictly for Bad Boys fans only.