Bad Boys 2

Watching a Jerry Bruckheimer produced film is the cinematic equivalent of consuming empty calories. It will fill you up, but it ends up taking up space that could be occupied by things that are better for you.

"Bad Boys II" is no exception to this rule. Director Michael Bay is a filmmaker fully grounded in Bruckheimer's rule of box office hit: bigger, louder and faster are better. Bay makes the movie snap along at a quick beat and there are plenty of action-packed sequences, all filmed with a post-John Woo flair for slow motion, kinetic action, random explosions and macho posturing during the middle of chaos. Oh, and there's a story hidden in here somewhere as well.

Martin Lawrence and Will Smith return as detectives Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowrery, respectively, two Miami narcotics officers who are magnets for acts of violence and leave war zones in their wake. As the film begins, they are cracking down on a drug cartel trafficking ecstasy in Southern Florida. Years of tension between the two police officers is starting to take its toll on Burnett, who is secretly plotting to transfer out of the squad because of all the stress he must endure being partnered with Lowrery.

This anxiety is further compounded by the fact that Lowrery has the hots for Burnett's sister Sydney (Gabrielle Union), a DEA agent who, as fate would have it, is working a different angle on the same case. Apparently a major Cuban drug dealer named Johnny Tapia (Jordi Mollà) is trying to muscle his competition in Miami through various degrees of violence, and is working with Ms. Burnett, whose cover is a crooked banker laundering his money.

Really, after that bit of exposition, the rest of the film writes itself. What follows are some of the most incredible action scenes ever filmed, including a twenty-minute sequence that starts as a heist gone wrong, turns into a car chase, changes into a violent shootout, and then turns back into a car chase involving an 18-wheeler dumping the cars it's transporting along the MacArthur Causeway.

The action scenes are, in essence, the only reason to watch the film. The rest of the movie is a downright mess. The characters are poorly written and unmemorable, the dialogue unbelievable under certain situations, and the narrative full of needless `comic' excursions and cornball scenery chewing. And all I can say is thank goodness for the Internet Movie Database, otherwise I wouldn't have remembered the names of half the characters in the film.

The problem with "Bad Boys II" is that like most summer releases for the last decade, it completely throws common sense out the window. The main characters leave chaos and mayhem behind them and never once are given a reprimand for their actions. The movie apparently wants to have all the fun of large scale pandemonium without all the consequences (deaths of innocent by-standers, lawsuits, suspensions, etc.). And villains are not human beings; they're just pop up arcade targets that exist only to be bullet fodder.

34 years ago when Sam Peckinpah gave us "The Wild Bunch," the first modern day action film, large scale violence was both exhilarating and scary. It showed us the horrors of aimless gunfire and the cost of recklessness; bloody and mutilated human beings, loss of respect for human life and families destroyed. It's sad to see that in 2003, following a similar scene that seemingly would leave numerous innocent people orphaned or widowed, Will Smith's character chooses to chew out his partner for accidentally putting a few bullet holes in his Ferrari.

Just be thankful he didn't bad-talk your mama, too.

5 out of 10 stars: the action scenes were good but everything else reeked.