Make 'Bad Boys' Bay Again
Make 'Bad Boys' Bay Again
Only Michael Bay can make a Michael Bay movie - and 'Bad Boys: Ride or Die' is no Michael Bay movie.
To try and judge Bad Boys: Ride or Die against the conventional rubric of cinema is a waste of time. Oh, the plot makes no sense, the one-dimensional characters have half-assed arcs, the themes are non-existent, and the morality is highly questionable, you say? No kidding: it’s a goddamn Bad Boys movie. The audience with which I saw the movie vocally adored it, and it’s a New York Times critic’s pick. All anyone really expects from the thing is for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence to crack wise while violently murdering an everlasting supply of villains amidst a coke-fueled music video, and the movie delivers that in spades. Save for a handful of good one-liners and one particularly unhinged action sequence - in which, oddly enough, Smith and Lawrence are mere spectators, rather than active participants - I found it to be pretty boring. I am also clearly in the minority.
So rather than attempt to unpack Ride or Die in any kind of traditional sense, I’d like to just ramble for a while about what I think the movie is missing, despite its apparent success as a crowd-pleaser: Michael Bay.
For the three of you who don’t know, Michael Bay is a brilliantly talented filmmaker who has devoted his career to making absolute trash. And I don’t mean trash the way, say, a Frank Henenlotter movie is “trash” in the eyes of “respectable” culture; I mean that Bay’s movies, in addition to being deeply stupid and visually incoherent, are morally reprehensible. They’re jingoistic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, militaristic right-wing propaganda that fetishizes machismo to such a degree it’s almost impossible to believe Bay isn’t overcompensating for something.
They’re also kind of fascinating.
That’s because Bay, despite his many faults, is, inarguably, an auteur. His aesthetic, dubbed “Bayhem,” is often imitated but never duplicated, and he cannot help but reveal a lot about his psyche with each film. How many other directors would make a series of children’s films that routinely feature cold-blooded executions, robots with genitalia, alien vagina dentata, legal justifications for statutory rape, Shia LaBeouf in Transformers Heaven, famous Boston meathead Mark Wahlberg as an inventor from Texas, and various beloved American character actors demeaning themselves with sophomoric jokes and inane dialogue like “Algorithms! Math!”? And how many directors who did this would also have the nerve to claim that their biggest influence is the Coen Brothers, and that the original West Side Story is their favorite movie? Say what you want about Michael Bay, but he is truly one of a kind.
The original Bad Boys, released in 1995, was Bay’s first feature film; prior to that, he’d been an extremely successful director of commercials and music videos, best known for his unforgettably clever contribution to the “Got Milk?” campaign and the endlessly popular clips for Meat Loaf’s “I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)” and Faster Pussycat’s “House of Pain.” All of which, by the way, are unmistakably directed by Michael Bay; his visual language was already established even at that nascent stage of his career, which is fairly remarkable in and of itself.
Bad Boys was an improbable hit. Originally been developed as a comedic vehicle for Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey, the umpteenth riff on the Lethal Weapon franchise leaves no cliché unexploited, and in any other director’s hands, would about as unique as the name Emily. Neither Smith nor Lawrence were considered movie stars at the time, and Bay reportedly fought with the financiers and his cast quite a bit during the making of the picture, using his own money to complete sequences the studio wouldn’t pay for and cajoling Smith into doing a sequence shirtless; the studio later paid Bay back, and Smith now credits the director with turning him into a sex symbol.
Despite the success of Bad Boys, it was eight years before Bay et al. made the sequel. By that point, Bay had directed two massive hits, The Rock (which is still his best work) and Armaggedon, and released his first box office misfire, Pearl Harbor (which did okay so long as you didn’t consider the massive budget). Point being, he was now an A-Lister with vastly more creative control than he’d had on the first Bad Boys, and that turned out to be the best worst thing that could have ever happened to his films.
Bad Boys II is arguably the first pure, unadulterated Michael Bay picture. It marks a clear turning point in his oeuvre, when his movies went from being very silly to downright insane. The plot revolves around smuggling ecstasy into the U.S. inside of dead bodies. A lengthy sequence finds Lawrence hiding with one such corpse, which is nude at the time; the body has ridiculously large fake breasts, and I can’t tell if Bay meant for the scene to be funny or sexy, but it’s neither. There’s a freeway chase that seems to have been edited by a Cubist. At the end of the flick, the heroes unlawfully invade a sovereign nation where they have no jurisdiction; they kill the heavy by shooting him onto a landmine. It is 150 minutes long. It remains one of the most hilariously excessive films I’ve ever seen in my life.
It was 17 years before they made a third Bad Boys movie, Bad Boys for Life; other than a brief cameo, Bay had nothing to do with the entry in the franchise, which was directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Bay also shows up for one scene in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, which was helmed by the same duo). I don’t know why he declined to direct the film; it’s not like the dude is prone to challenging himself narratively, and the action scenes are the only part of the franchise that requires any new ideas. Surely, Bay could crash an ambulance as well in Bad Boys 7 as he could crash an ambulance in Ambulance, no?
Adil and Bilall, as they are officially credited, have done their best to replicate the feel of Bay’s first two movies, and on a surface level, they succeed: everything is bathed in neon colors, there’s a ridiculous number of drone shots and a shoot-out that was clearly inspired by first-person shooter video games, etc, etc. And yet, these movies are so clearly not directed by Bay: the story, idiotic though it may be, is far too easy follow, as is the editing, which often allows the audience to actually have some sense of where everyone is geographically located in relation to everyone else (a big no-no in Bay’s action sequences, which usually seem to have been choreographed by a toddler on speed). Adil and Bilall’s Bad Boyses are about crooked cops, parent/child relationships, and the ravages of time; they’d never dream of shoving a dead porn star full of illicit drugs or having the heroes risk an international incident.
This is a long way of saying that while Bad Boys: Ride or Die is competent (at least insofar as servicing the very low bar set by its audience goes), it’s not special the way Bay’s films are. 21 years after its release, people still marvel at how ludicrous Bad Boys II is; four years later, no one is even talking about Bad Boys for Life anymore. Only Michael Bay can make a Michael Bay movie, and I’ll take one of his ridiculously self-indulgent outings over a generic, middle-of-the-road picture any day.