Back in the day when Martin Lawrence had top billing over Will Smith, this movie landed in cinemas in all its gun-wielding, vehicle-exploding, post-shootout-wisecracking humungousness. Now rereleased for its 30th anniversary, it was the first in a franchise featuring the squabblingly bromantic Miami cop partnership, created by screenwriter George Gallo, directed by Michael Bay and produced with towering unsubtlety by the legendary action duo Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, one of their final films before Simpson died of a colossal drug overdose.
Lawrence plays Marcus Burnett, a married man with kids, partnered up with Mike Lowrey (Smith), who is supposed to be a single guy and ladies’ man. Oddly for a cop, he’s also supposed to be rich, with family money, which explains his smooth bachelor pad in an art deco apartment building; like so many interiors in this film, it is shot from a low angle in a kind of groovy heat haze, with shafts of sunlight beaming through – this being the signifier for interior design classiness. It is in this flat that the film rather bafflingly contrives some goofy sub-Billy-Wilder comedy as Marcus passes himself off as Mike, leading a material witness into this property for her own protection and pretending that the place is his.
Marcus and Mike are called in by Captain Howard, played here in time-honoured exasperated-police-chief style by veteran character turn Joe Pantoliano, when a mountain of impounded heroin is stolen from police stores. They have just a few days to get it back before Internal Affairs officer Sinclair (Marg Helgenberger) starts to bust their balls, and it turns out that the villain is bestubbled French bad guy Fouchet, played by Tchéky Karyo. Their witness to his wrongdoing is Julie Mott, played by Téa Leoni; she is robustly and affectionately described here as a “hooker” (that was all cool in 1995) and basically becomes the gutsy third member of their crime-fighting team. The giant finale takes place in a classic Michael Bay locale: a hangar in the middle of what is apparently the desert, full of planes and cars to be blown up.
The look and the aesthetic of Bad Boys – the luxury performance cars, night clubs, sunlit streetscapes, man-mountain bad guys, guns and young women – in a way found its cultural importance not in the continuing Bad Boys franchise but in the Grand Theft Auto video game, which launched just a couple of years later. Watched again now, Smith’s performance is weirdly subdued, as if all the emphasis is really on the established comic talent Lawrence, and Smith is his straight man.
• Bad Boys is in UK and Irish cinemas from 21 March.
