Movie Details
| Title: | Bad Boys II | |
| Director: | Michael Bay | |
| Year: | 2003 | |
| Genre: | Cop | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 04.01.07 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (7)
- 6 Underground
- Ambulance
- The Island
- Pain & Gain
- Transformers
- Transformers: Dark of the Moon
- Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 04.01.07 | DVD | Since so much of Hot Fuzz directly references a handfull of action cop films (this and Point Break especially), watching yesterday's fuzztival put me, along with everyone else I talked to last night, in a real mood to see Bad Boys II again. It's only like 4 years old now but it already seems like some fever dream that a movie that gonzo exessive could be made. I'm surprised to find I don't have a previous note about it on here because I'm certain I've already written about my theory that this movie is about as close to a Grand Theft Auto adaptation and you can get. It kind of seems like reality at first but the longer you watch it the clearer it is that it's not; it's a facade of reality specifically engineered to create awesome moments and things like physics or laws or time itself are made flexible by the higher priority of visual astonishment and a general potpouri of elements that make you involuntarily say "cool." And really GTA is the same way. Plus you got Haitians, you got Cubans, you got the Haitians fighting the Cubans, you got missions involving following people, killing people, chasing after people in really expensive cars that you hijack on a whim, you got crazy-ass shit like dead bodies falling out the back of vans, you got insane bad guys that you get to kill at the end, and last but not least you got explosions. Now tell me that's not GTA: Vice City. I think also that, as time moves forward and this movie becomes more detached from its release context, more people are going to see just how crazy this movie is. I remember it getting absolutely thrashed by the critics and pretty much everyone I knew who saw it (save my one college buddy who always loved Michael Bay), but yesterday pretty much everyone was going off on how great it was. I really think it's been Michael Bay's best work to date. I like this so much more than Bad Boys I. A group of friends were talking about it the other night and someone said that was limited by its budget, which made us all laugh because it's ridiculous and true. Bad Boys I is like Michael Bay's Clerks... this is him at his full potential. Criterion should forget about Armageddon and The Rock and buy the rights to this. Seriously. And I really love how the last half hour is basically its own separate movie. Like, the last half hour is more or less Bad Boys III. They really shot two movies worth of stuff for Bad Boys II but just condensed it all down into one fuck-off movie instead of drawing it out like The Matrix. It's wanton displays of violence, willfull destruction of property, and wonderful celebration of testosterone. |
