Ray Pride

If it weren't for Entertainment Weekly, whole chunks of pop culture would remain but rumors to me.

The last multiplayer shooter game I found myself playing introduced me to the pleasures of being repeatedly slaughtered by an 11-year-old with a wicked post-braces smile; Vincent D'Onofrio's supposed to be loopy-cool in some procedural or other, and Jerry Bruckheimer's become a big success at splashy television as well. I finish this week's EW, I feel like I understand the alternate dimension.

Still, sometimes I feel like I should be getting a little bad television under my belt now and again, finding myself forgiving slapdash comedies that the average viewer would be peeved about after having tossed eight or ten dollars into the campfire. Despite some modest echoes of Ye Olde "Miami Vice" in its makeup, "Bad Boys II" doesn't remind me of television. Several extended sections of the DSM-IV, maybe: if anyone wants a colorful illustration of the psychosis of big-budget movies that fully explore the sensibilities of its runamuck auteurs, hooboy, I don't want to see anything nuttier or more nihilist than this for a long time to come. Some colleagues suggest going back and catching "Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle," which was co-written by two of "Bad Boys II"'s credited screenwriters.

While credits pop past, the opening scenes burn up a couple tens of millions of dollars with slick, familiar super-swooping Bay-style action. Cinematographer Amir Mokri, who once shot delicate films like "Joy Luck Club," now works on "Coyote Ugly" and this contraption, the images concluding with Bay's directorial credit under a Klan cross in flames.

With all this pizzazz at his disposal, Bay still, within those opening moments, has to soil himself with an obvious, oleaginous supposedly Cuban baddie whose first few words on screen including "Fokking beetches." Plot? Two cops--madman Martin Lawrence, cock-of-the-walk Will Smith--bicker in Miami, having committed enough terrorist-style atrocities that it's a wonder the movie isn't about secret military tribunals. A Cuban drug lord is exporting Ecstasy in stiffs.

Yes, these are lovely go-boom practical stunts, and like "The Matrix: Reloaded" and "Terminator 3: The Rise of The Machines," big monster machines wreak havoc with neat digital enhancements. ("Bad Boys II" pulls an old-fashioned C-movie Roger Corman trick--the vehicles compacted down into kibble are usually along the lines of fifteen year old K-Cars with bad paint jobs.) "Oh, that one puckered up my butthole," Smith purrs when one such twirling hulk spins past his ears.

One car crash leads to another, and soon two hours and twenty minutes of quality a/c have passed. There are non sequiturs galore, and I did laugh a lot, when I wasn't cringing. There's one scene of nutty vaudeville when the pair pretend to be gangstas to a 15-year-old who wants to date Lawrence's daughter, but much of the rest of Lawrence's' presence is simple minstrelsy. Roll eyes. Act cra-a-azy. Say "motherfucker." Repeat.

Who wants to witness a trainwreck? Nobody, and I always hope for the best even with a nutjob prospect like this. Along with the "Charlie's Angels" team, the script is credited to Ron Shelton ("White Men Can't Jump," "Bull Durham") and reformed junkie and "Alf" writer Jerry Stahl, whose joy in the needle was chronicled in "Permanent Midnight," his memoir and eventual movie. (He now writes television for Bruckheimer.) It's almost as perverse as seeing Robert "Chinatown" Towne's name on the "Mission Impossible" scripts. While the movie seems to be subverting or lampooning its Maxim-overdrive point-of-view, it quickly turns fetishistic.

Consider Bay and Mokri's fiber-optic-style nookie-cam, first snaking, then striding between thonged stripper ass-cheeks in a wet-T-shirt enriched dance club, or the brand names that tickle like an autistic's mantra through even the most violent and gruesome scenes: Lite, Skyy, Twinings, MGD, Porsche, GMC Yukon, Sony, Panasonic, Double Gulp, Dell, "Bacardi mojitos," Pepsi, Cadillac,

After the shopping spree, let's open up the nastier can of worms: "Bad Boys II" is particularly obsessed with gay sex, rat sex, necrophilia and exploding body parts. Perhaps the movie actually be called "Body Parts II." It's that disgusting. And that's not a moral quibble at all: it's just peculiar to see so much awful human Moo-and-Oink larding the screen, often slamming wetly into the camera's lens. There's more icky splatter than in a chicken processing plant.

There's one bravura, post-David Fincher bit of digital wizardry, a bullet's point-of-view gouging someone's ass cheek, camera digitally swirls past the character's face, then back toward the bullet, which has its blood-puddling way with a baddie's face.

"It hit the meat," Smith says, exploring his buddy's bottom. "It's ain't nowhere near the hole." (The movie tops itself repeatedly, perhaps most notably in the iteration, "Fucking ratones eating my fucking money, rat fuckers, rat fuckers.")

Decadent or nihilist? It's the devil's dance. The aftermath of every action setpiece is shown to be ankle deep in debris and spent shells like firecracker casings in an old fashioned Mott Street Chinese New Year. The movie readily pranks over the line into high-octane decadence, and once the outright allegations that Cuba's sustained existence is because of drug manufacturing, it can't be called anything but antisocial swill.

When the Bad Boys wind up tiptoeing through a minefield at the front gate of the Guantanamo Naval Base, after an outright lift of Jackie Chan's famous destroy-the-hillside-shantytown climax from "Police Story," anything's possible. I thought maybe, a musical number with orange-jumpsuited, hand-, waist- and foot-manacled Al Qaeda suspects. Irony's not dead, only quality.

"Bad Boys II" opens Friday.

(2003-07-16)

Also by Ray Pride

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Mark Moskowitz has spent twenty years making political campaign commercials. In his first feature, "Stone Reader," he's on-camera as much as anyone.
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"Pirates" is one of the most outrageous, goofy, giddy, hilarious juggling acts I've witnessed in a movie theater in a long, long time.
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Out of the Past
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Short Runs
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Fille fatale
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Meta fear
(2003-06-18)

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