“Taking a close look at what’s around us, there…there is some sort of a harmony—it is the harmony of… overwhelming and collective murder.” – Werner Herzog in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams
“WOOOOO!!!” – Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) upon witnessing considerable loss of life in Bad Boys II
In Michael Bay’s sequel to 2007’s Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf)—an insufferable Bay protagonist in a legacy of them—scrawls ancient Cybertronian text on a dorm room poster of another Michael Bay movie, Bad Boys II. This self-reference bordering on self-reverence isn’t new. Last year’s AmbuLAnce mentions Bad Boys both explicitly (bystanders compare a moment to Bad Boys) and in imagistic shorthand, Bay mimicking his own regularly mimicked shot of Miami PD detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) rising into frame as the simmering southern Florida skyline spins behind them. Capitalism ferments in the sun at the end of the world. Safe to say you probably know the shot: In Bad Boys II, Bay whips out the exact same shot again, only this time, Marcus slowly hangs up a mobile phone and adds, “Shit just got real.”
The older he gets, the less Bay resists the opportunity to allude, overtly and often, to the iconism of his previous films. But in 2009, with the Transformers sequel seemingly rushed into theaters just two years following the original, for Bay to point to Bad Boys II, the only other sequel he had (and has) ever made, feels like a deeper, more deliberate gesture towards his own work. Though Bay would continue to reimagine the Transformers movies as increasingly retconned dystopian odysseys, Revenge of the Fallen is the true follow-up to Transformers: Doubling down, without hesitation, on absolutely every impulse entertained in the first movie. Property destruction, death count, leering shots of Megan Fox’s body, an ever-complicating mythos, the irrepressibly psychotic might of the American military industrial complex, racist robots, incomprehensible CGI, the incessant whine of Sam Witwicky’s voice—all is amplified exponentially. And in the middle of it, Bay alludes to his archetypal sequel, released less than a decade before, on July 18, 2003. See Bad Boys II, Bay seems to say. That is what a sequel is supposed to be: Indulgent, reactive, loud and completely unnecessary.
A making-of documentary, included as a supplemental feature on the Bad Boys II DVD, opens on Michael Bay recalling his 1995 debut: “I remember the day before I was going to direct my little $10,000,000 picture—it was my chance, my one shot—I remember Don Simpson walking into the office with Jerry [Bruckheimer] and he slammed down a 60-page stack of notes, and said, ‘Jerry we’re taking our name off this picture,’ and I saw my whole career go down the toilet on a Sunday afternoon.”
Bruckheimer confirms Bay’s anxieties in an interview immediately following Bay’s recollection: The guy was right to feel the pressure. Bay had to deliver. His burgeoning career depended on it. And eventually he did, the film earning $141 million on a measly $19 million budget, enough of a guarantor to, by Armageddon three years later, see Bay shepherding a $140 million budget. Still, the guy in that 2003 making-of doc is not a guy who has shaken the need to prove himself.
In the 20 years since Bad Boys II, Bay is still proving himself. Five Transformers movies, Pain & Gain, 13 Hours, 6 Underground and AmbuLAnce—each successive title is a testament not to growth or to a broadening of his filmmaking vision, but to compression. To being able to always do more because he’s given more resources based on previously being able to do more based on being given more resources. To trusting in the clarity and strength of his vision, however violent and knuckleheaded and ultimately bleak. To always delivering. To masterful blockbuster pastiche, solidified. Every new Bay, then, is the epitome of Bay—not an experiment or a detour, but the full expression of his talent and influence up until the next chance he gets to do more of the same.
From that primordial stew of self-doubt and furious ambition crawls Bad Boys II, a sequel as Michael Bay’s blown-out manifestation of the unnecessary nature of sequels. Nothing is economic, or subtle, or measured in Bad Boys II—instead, all is mounting spectacle, existing to mount for the sake of mounting. The plot, an excuse to lay the groundwork for ridiculous action scenes upon which Smith and Lawrence can drape their indefatigable charm and improvised banter, is simple: So-called Johnny Tapia (Jordi Mollà), Cuban drug lord and swiss army nemesis, is behind an influx of super-powered ecstasy into Miami. Marcus and Mike, obnoxious motormouth family man and charming playboy psychopath respectively, are on the case, backed by the militarization of the local police department’s Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT). Increasingly complicating the duo’s ability to kill every drug dealer in sight is Marcus’s sister Syd (Gabrielle Union), an undercover DEA agent just recently added to Johnny Tapia’s payroll. Meanwhile, tension between Marcus and Mike escalates as Mike has seemingly learned nothing from their first major adventure, continuing to flagrantly murder people and disrespect the dignity of all living things, dragging Marcus into one mindlessly dangerous situation after another. Mike’s also started dating Syd surreptitiously, a secret Mike knows Marcus won’t take well, however it’s revealed.
It’s the stuff of buddy cop fodder, but pushed to every available extreme. The throughline of Bad Boys is that all cops must be psychopaths to confront a psychopathic world, and that Bay thinks that’s OK. Wasting taxpayer dollars and innocent lives and good taste are the terrible exigencies of the death spiral of modern American life. The only way to respond to such a reality is to meet it on its own terms, blow it to hell, go home, hug your wife and try to sleep one more night, bearing the weight of the many lives you’ve ended.
Contradiction is at the heart of all that Bay does. He loves the cops but hates authority. He adores the army but dwells on the doom the military has brought to our scarred earth. He believes that one must do anything in one’s power to do what is right while never losing sight of the exceptional cost of doing what is right. He exploits womens’ bodies as sexual objects but also exploits the bodies of white men as the most disposable. He festoons his epic sci-fi franchise with Judeo-Christian iconography but ends it with Optimus Prime and Bumblebee killing God. He wades into the liminal space of buddy cop flicks, where homoeroticism and homophobia mingle breathlessly.
With Bad Boys II, Bay already had everything he would ever need—and was willing to do whatever it took to send the franchise off a cliff. He had earned the right to stage a scene lifted wholesale from Jackie Chan’s Police Story, to build a shantytown in Puerto Rico (standing in for Cuba) and then run it to the ground, Marcus and Mike devastating a small village’s worth of impoverished laborers who have no choice but to work for the local drug lord. Both movies are about cops putting justice in the way of human life; that a character goes out of their way to ensure Marcus and Mike that they are only destroying a hillside of makeshift drug manufacturing outfits does nothing to distract from the life-affirming disregard for human life. Bay and cinematographer Amir Mokri capture mayhem without reserve, celebrating the chaos at the heart of Bay’s obsession with cinema. Not only must Johnny Tapia’s house blow up, the hovels of those he oppressed must be spectacularly laid to waste, because what accompanies police belligerence better than punishing poor people for being poor? Bad Boys II beatifies the unnecessary.
“Necessary” is a word that comes up twice in Bad Boys II. First is in the film’s opening, when a white supremacist with his gun to Marcus’ head and his fat forearm around Marcus’ neck uses a racial slur to taunt Mike, who is characteristically wielding two handguns and threatening to murder everyone. “Damn, sir, was that necessary?” Marcus asks, sweat pouring from his face. No surface is dry, just as no tension or point of social awkwardness goes unexploited. Marcus and Mike are part of a well-funded op to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan—during a rally in a swamp no less, replete with obligatory burning crosses—in order to track down the aforementioned supply of super-powered ecstasy. This means that Marcus and Mike, played by two famous and prolific Black actors who built much of their public profile on the success of the first Bad Boys, emerge from Klan robes to disembowel and dis-brain a circle of hooting rednecks, filling the thick air with bullets and bone fragments and the stench of exploded flesh, as well as actual explosions. Drawn out in slo-mo, the image brands itself into the fabric of Bay’s filmography, replacing all meaning from these symbols of institutional racism and urban oppression with purely kinetic glee. No desire exists in that moment but to watch Will Smith shoot a KKK member in the face.
Henry Rollins as the nameless, thick-necked “TNT Leader” leads the charge of camouflaged swamp soldiers to assist Marcus and Mike in battle, while Michael Shannon as token racist Floyd Poteet rotates through a thousand gurnings, bending time around his character actor prowess. Chauvinist pop cultural touchstones collide, smeared into lovely sensations of movement. You can taste the weight of a loaded gun in Bay’s movies, flinching at how casually weapons are waved in everyone’s faces. You can care for characters while sensing the senselessness of their presence on this mortal coil. You can feel uncomfortable at how carelessly Bay approaches race relations or wish he made more of an effort to draw the line from Mike’s penchant for killing people to the institutionalization of police violence. Is any of this necessary? Damn, sir.
The second time we hear the word “necessary” is again from Marcus’s mouth. Staring into the back door, open, of a van full of corpses, he and Mike are in the midst of a high-speed chase, having just stolen a 2003 Cadillac CTS from Dan Marino, who was taking the car on a test drive. Marcus and Mike have deduced that Johnny Tapia is emptying out corpses to hide and transport the vast sums of money he’s making in exchange for all the super-ecstasy, but that revelation is second to the purpose of putting the duo in Dan Marino’s car behind a potentially shameless action setpiece. “This is not necessary!” Marcus shrieks only moments before the corpses tumble out of the back of the van. Swerving around rolling wads of pale flesh and speeding traffic alike, Mike can’t help but clip a corpse, popping its head off in a curlicue of spine and blood. “Dan Marino should definitely buy this car,” Mike tells Marcus. “Well not this one, because I’m gonna fuck this one up.” The joy of carnage is irrepressible.
Later, Marcus and Mike’s supervisor, Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano, S-tier short, angry, tombstone-faced cop), lists the cost of all the damage incurred. That money’s got to come from somewhere, right, and as every captain for every buddy cop movie has ever and will ever have, Howard’s got the brass so far up his ass he can taste the metal filings. Bureaucracy will always stand in the way of a cop’s ability to deliver justice or use Miami taxpayer dollars to liquidate a Cuban drug dealer’s multimillion-dollar mansion. At one point, Mike recalls a promise he wrote in Marcus’s high school yearbook, “We ride together, we die together—bad boys for life.” Such is the bond between partners, enabling superhuman feats and impossible luck as they remove the lives from the dregs of the Miami underworld.
This functional concern for budgets and oversight and transparency in local police departments goes against the tenets of Michael Bay’s expressionistic action as much as it’s beholden to it. The glory of every eviscerated scumbag and flung body part spilling from an egregious explosion—very little if any of it CGI—is in Bay’s insistence that money is never an issue, that the price of reshoots and filmmaking equipment and studio time is second to the quality of the shot. Trevor Rabin’s score mostly ignores Mark Mancina’s original Bad Boys theme to no one’s favor, serving up Dust Brothers lite in clear dedication to Fight Club’s opening vibes. But this is not enough: Bad Boys II features additional music by Dr. Dre, and “Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs” as “Executive Music Consultant,” which mostly amounts to “Shake Ya Tailfeather” soundtracking yet another moment for Mike Lowrey to look incredible, his drip exquisite and bloodlust tantalizingly unsatiated. However much Dre and Diddy’s services cost, you can barely tell they touched this thing. There’s poetry in that.
Twenty years ago, not that long after 9/11, Bad Boys II was an ode to the incredibly cool-looking violence of American exceptionalism. A love letter to indulgence. A celebration of the expensive enterprise of huge crews making huge pictures for huge audiences. A reliquary for the detritus of the cultural sewer that was the early 2000s. An excuse to watch studio dollars turned to fire and ash on screen. Today, Bad Boys II is a reminder of a better time for blockbusters. What does it say about the state of contemporary blockbuster filmmaking that we long for a time when smarmy guys with chips on their shoulders exorcized their impotence and insecurities on screen, wielding big beautiful budgets unnecessarily? We used to be a country, a proper country.
Dom Sinacola is a Portland-based writer and editor. He founded a blog on Werner Herzog movies, The Werner Herzblog, and he’s also on Letterboxd.