59 - Bad Boys

    Two cops are tasked with tracking down a substantial amount of heroin, stolen from the evidence locker at the precinct, as well as charged with protecting a witness.
    This movie is bad.  I’m reluctant to say that, because I generally look for the good in any movie I see.  There’s still some good in this movie.  The direction is actually pretty interesting.  This was Michael Bay’s first major credit, and he shows a certain amount of restraint.  During the dramatic sequences, he has a flair for some inventive camera work.  Unusual angles, smooth circling of characters.
    During the action sequences, his direction goes down.  The edits get fast, and seem more like filler shots than an effort to tell the story clearly.  He also has a weird tendency to use closer shots than seem right.  Still, these are things that I noticed, but they aren’t as bad as they can get now.
    The real failing that the movie has is the script.  The actual story isn’t bad.  A buddy cop movie, both characters have reasonable arcs.  The heist is an interesting angle as well.  But the script is just terrible.  It comes across tonally confused, behaving mostly like a comedy of mistaken identity, but switching up between action and police procedural.  Even this isn’t terrible.  What’s terrible is that every single thing that happens to advance the plot requires the characters to be complete morons.  No one communicates ideas with each other, everyone acts unreasonably, and the weirdest part is that they don’t seem to act like cops in any sense of the word.  They barely investigate anything.  When they find a dead body, they decide to just root through the room, move the body around a bit, pull papers from under him.  And as far as I can tell, they never let the rest of the police know that this body is out there.  I’m sure they probably do, but it would be nice to have a line where one of them calls them up and says so.
    They maintain ridiculous lies for the sake of sustaining a gag, which would be fine, except that it works against their personalities and the jobs.
    And this is more of a personal gripe.  I hate the dialogue.  Every scene is nonstop winking at the audience, extended jokes and innuendos.  There’s very rarely any actual substance being discussed, nothing that advances the story.
    Yet… this movie had a remarkable impact.  It defined Michael Bay’s style.  It redirected buddy comedies, action movies, and even the approach to “hip” dialogue.  it’s too bad that this didn’t come out in the 80s.  It would have been much more palatable if it didn’t come out as late as 1995.