Bad Boys for Life

An unexpected companion piece to last year's Gemini Man, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's Bad Boys for Life once again considers Will Smith, and the star persona he has created, in terms of obsolescence and replication. Where Ang Lee's film favoured mechanical reproduction, for Life offers a supernaturally slanted duplicate, a piece of youthful vigour stolen then reconfigured to exact a personal revenge. Smith returns as Mike Lowrey, a sociopathic rich kid turned cop, originally positioned as the cool guy opposite to Marcus Burnett, Martin Lawrence's sweaty, aggravated police detective. The original Bad Boys centred around an identity mix-up with each of the top-billed stars pretending to live the life of the other. Smith got to play the dutiful family man while Lawrence delivered his own snarling take on a moneyed, two-fisted Lothario.

Bad Boys for Life surprises because it remembers these tossed-off building blocks - particularly the ease with which Lowrey took to slipping on a new identity - using them to power events that now stretch backwards and forwards in time. Unlike both Michael Bay entries, films that never felt any particularly need to stay on one firm emotional wavelength, this third Bad Boys actually aims to define several human relationships then extract non-hysterical drama from the ways in which they evolve or clash. This development requires a level of earnest introspection that, while not completely new to the series, is usually smuggled in then drowned out by hideous violence or skits centred on gay panic. Arbi and Fallah's film elides Bay's radioactive mania (and, frankly, the knuckle-dragging director's world class flair for action and visual invention), arriving at a tone that is closer to the chummier end of the Lethal Weapon sequels.

Suicide Squad

DC's Nu-Metal cover of Guardians of the Galaxy loves introductions. The film is so obsessed with the power of inauguration it keeps doing it over and over again, even when it's clear the audience is fully and firmly aware of who everybody is supposed to be. Despite some incessant jukeboxing, not to mention some strongly worded notes from Will Smith and his representation, Suicide Squad's first lead-in is its most dynamic. Director David Ayer's grubby fingers are all over a leering little sequence centred around Ike Barinholtz's spiteful interactions with Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn and the rest of the feature criminals.

For a few brief sketches, Suicide Squad manages to dredge up a whiff of the poisonous hysterics felt in Natural Born Killers. As in Oliver Stone's film, we see revolting, predatory men using the power conferred to them by lawful institutions to pray on the imprisoned and indentured. It's a decent, if sour opening gambit for a film that pretends it's kin to The Dirty Dozen when it's really just a live-action interpretation of the desire to collect shiny, lacquered knives in violent video games. It seems like we're being asked to root for powerful, individualistic victims while they're being poked and prodded by arrogant cops who think they're untouchable. Comeuppance to follow shortly.

These ideas are t-boned by another prologue, apparently from a completely different version of the film, in which the mission is introduced rolling and centred around the destructive relationship between Cara Delevinge's possessed backpacker and Joel Kinnaman's bland all-American hero. This situation room draft may lead into an altogether less lively Suicide Squad but it does do one thing right, it gives Viola Davis' Amanda Waller - the film's most dangerous, contradictory character - a little more room to actively dominate her peers. As it turns out, Waller is the one genuinely chaotic element in a film that even manages to make unfathomable, prehistoric, magic seem completely routine.

Waller is capricious and terrifyingly unpredictable in a way that Jared Leto's pass at the Joker never is. He's diminished both by his ineffectual screen time and the filmmaker's (marketing department's?) peculiar choice to focus on the kind of character traits that psychopaths might deem romantic. The actor's contribution registers as fussy, overly concerned with his Martin-Shkreli-does-trap styling and a pathetic desire to treat Harley like his favourite toy. Everything about the portrayal comes across as small and self-obsessed, a rich phoney playing at being a supervillain rather than the real thing. Waller meanwhile, free of suffocating brand expectation, is allowed to be in the shit, executing colleagues the second she decides she doesn't need them. In terms of the kind of cold-blooded machinations you should hang a franchise on, it isn't even close.

Bad Boys 2

There's an argument to be made that Michael Bay's Bad Boys 2 is the purest attempt by Hollywood to recreate a Hong Kong style action film. Bay's film doesn't try to replicate the platonic ideal of John Woo's The Killer though, instead it's closer to something people in Hong Kong might've actually wanted to see, a film like Sammo Hung's dayglo matinee My Lucky Stars. Like Hung's film Bad Boys 2 has wild mood shifts and a dramatic premise completely subservient to seeing our favourite film stars yukking it up. Terrifying action choreography is bracketed by scenes of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence bickering about upholstery; Michael Bay cross-pollinates Golden Harvest star vehicles with rap album skits and gun porn.

In Bad Boys 2 countries are invaded to right familial transgressions. Comedy routines about buck-toothed Klansmen track into gooey head shots and two entirely separate sequences objectify cadavers. A significant chunk of the middle section is given over to the two leads posing as pest exterminators in an effort to infiltrate the bad guy's mansion. There's no attempt to build any real tension - we don't feel like either of their lives are in danger. Instead it's an opportunity to push a camera in extremely close to Martin Lawrence's awed, sweaty face as he watches two rats copulate missionary. Basically, Bad Boys 2 lives to entertain you. It doesn't know what you want, so it tries to give you everything. Here are some apocalyptic car crashes. Maybe you didn't like that so here's Smith and Lawrence talking about anal sex. If that didn't do it for you, how about a shoot-out in which the camera moves in and around the combatants like a snake?

Bad Boys 2 even has the good grace to roll with an adult certificate - this isn't bad taste cinema as smuggled Summer product, it's brazen. Invective and exit wounds. Intended to be seen by its most enthusiastic audience on home video. Bad Boys 2 doesn't pretend to be a tight narrative experience, it takes the bare model of a cops and robbers movie and embellishes, hurling money and ego and reality TV musical punctuation at you. Action cinema as a hyper-caffeinated variety act whose sole aim is to make you feel like you got your money's worth. Bad Boys 2 wants you to feel like your price of admission was nothing compared to how many fresh-off-the-assembly-line cars got rolled then gutted.

Bad Boys

Originally conceived as a post-SNL vehicle for Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz - that is until producer Don Simpson took the pair to Vegas and horrified them by being a party animal / disgusting fucking pig - Bad Boys eventually landed with Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. Propaganda Films graduate Michael Bay finds himself hamstrung on his first feature trying to make sense of a reheated buddy cop script that frequently rambles off into dreadful. Based on the evidence presented here, it's easy to see why Bay cultivated a distrust for the written word. Four credited screenwriters couldn't shift Bad Boys out of its clunky, tell-don't-show funk. The director gets far better results by just letting the two stars bicker in tight close-ups. Elsewhere, Tea Leoni tries desperately to wring some sort of pathos out of the mumbling, stuttering arc she's been assigned.

Bad Boys is an object lesson in the difference between an actor and a star. Workhorse Leoni sticks to the blueprint and comes off wooden. Lawrence and Smith fuck the script off and ham it up, becoming masculine ideals to 15 year old boys everywhere. Lawrence and Smith's contempt for the basic mechanics of the film they're in saves Bad Boys to a degree. By disengaging they get to be the audience stand-ins, commenting on the formulaic proceedings. The pair don't act anything like your typical, heroic movie cops. They break the law and flippantly talk about killing people. Most importantly they aren't emotionally invested, because, truthfully, neither are we. This is the idea Michael Bay has built a career on. Why bother trying to construct meaningful characters or situations when you can instead shoot your actors like they're in a hyper-sexualised music video? You make your stars the crux of the commercial. The product they are selling is cool.