Flick is cop flop: 'Bad Boys II' tests patience

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

BAD BOYS II: (Rated R) No stars (Very Poor). Staking out new territory on the frontiers of cinematic excess, this bloated action film is interminably long and unbearably hyperbolic with barely enough plot for a one-hour TV cop show. Starring Martin Lawrence, Will Smith. Directed by Michael Bay. Columbia Pictures, 150 minutes.

It easily earns honors as Summer 2003's most egregious and gratuitous film.

And that's not to mention its two-and-a-half-hour running time, which will exhaust even the least-discriminating action fan. This isn't a movie — it's an endurance test.

Could "BB2" have been, say, an hour shorter? Are you kidding? There's less plot here than in a one-hour episode of "CSI: Miami." But if it were shorter, director Michael Bay ("Bad Boys," "The Rock," "Pearl Harbor") wouldn't have been able to include every single violent or pyrotechnic image that ever flitted across his imagination.

The stars return as Miami narcotics detectives Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Smith), who have been tipped that a mammoth shipment of Ecstasy is coming in from Europe.

Every time they get a lead, they mobilize what appears to be the entire Miami police force and wind up wrecking half of the city, only to find disappointingly small quantities of drugs. Even after the third or fourth time, their temper-challenged boss (Joe Pantoliano) doesn't reference the boy who cried wolf, nor does he stop authorizing this grandiose deployment of manpower.

The weary subplots include Marcus' on-going psychotherapy, an apparent result of the case from the last film. Marcus, a family man, is fed up with Mike's reckless ways and has put in for a new assignment to break up the partnership. Marcus also is busy worrying about his younger sister (Gabrielle Union), a DEA agent who is chasing the same Ecstasy kingpin as Mike and Marcus.

Bay and the writers use these plot strands to justify the patience-testing length of the film. The law of averages eventually works in their favor: There are three genuinely funny scenes in this film and, of the cornucopia of car chases, one that is actually breathtaking in its extravagance and style.

So there are 20 good minutes. But that leaves another two hours of generic action filler, including numerous gun battles in which the heroes display their immunity to automatic-weapons fire. Bay is addicted to bullets and producer Jerry Bruckheimer is his enabler.

Bay's so insecure that "Bad Boys II" is crammed with moments that scream "Look at what an outrageously imaginative director I am." These desperate pleas for attention take the form of garish camera shots, such as the slow-motion close-up of a bullet as it leaves Mike's gun, shatters several glass pitchers, pierces Marcus' posterior and finally (and graphically) hits a bad guy in the neck (with requisite exploding blood bag).

"Bad Boys II" stakes out new territory on the frontier of cinematic excess. More than any other film this summer (including "Charlie's Angels 2"), it stands as a symbol of everything that's wrong with modern Hollywood.

Rated R for graphic violence, profanity, partial nudity.