"The boys are back and badder than ever": goes the tagline of the film. Unfortunately, it holds true for the quality of the film as well. The second instalment of the adventures of Miami narcotics detectives Mike (Smith) and Marcus (Lawrence) has only one novelty: tracking the drug mafia back to Fidel Castro's motherland. But hold on, an American fantasy can't rest at that. So you find the Cubans and the Russians being turned into ruthless adversaries in the deadly drug war.
Our bad boys are part of the special task force assigned to investigate the flow of Ecstasy into Miami. This brings them face-to-face with drug lord Tapia who nurses massive business expansion plans which they obviously need to bust. Meanwhile, Marcus's sister Syd (Union) is an undercover agent working stealthily towards unearthing Tapia's agenda. In between, she also falls in love with Mike, enough to drive her brother round the bend.
The crux of the film lies in the Mike and Marcus bonding. However, the interaction between Smith and Lawrence is too loud and grating for comfort. It's a whole lot of noise that their relationship seems to hinge on and most times you wish they were a lot less quarrelsome or if they could just shut up. Bad Boys also unleashes a much too ample display of gratuitous violence—physical as well as verbal. Despite some interesting sweeping camera angles, the action, the car chases, the explosions irritate rather than exhilarate. Anyhow, what can be so great about 22 cars and three boats getting smashed? At most, it reveals the terrible inefficiency of our star cops who'd have been stripped of their duties by the police, even in Third World India. To top it all, the jokes are in absolute bad taste, full of sexual, sexist and racist innuendoes. About bullets lodging in people's backside, if you please. The most tasteless and nastiest of all pranks is the sequence where the dead bodies, used by Tapia to stash away drugs, get slammed all over the busy Miami roads. Appreciating Bad Boys II depends on your sense of humour and tolerance. Perhaps, one needs to be an adolescent boy to appreciate the machismo and the high dose of testosterone. I found it an unpleasant, mean movie all the way.
US Top 5
1. Jeepers Creepers 2
2. Freaky Friday
3. S.W.A.T.
4. Pirates of the Caribbean
5. Open Range
INDIAN Top 5
1. Gangaajal
2. Koi Mil Gaya
3. Hungama
4. Qayamat
5. Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost
Courtesy: Film Information
