This just sucks.
I mean, of COURSE it hasn’t aged well - the women’s dialogue and their roles, the ongoing subplot about the two main characters being mistaken for gay men.
But rewatching it now in 2025, it’s so painfully boring. Poor Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. They are capable of so much but are forced to slowly wring every possible comedic moment from each scene, struggling to turn small gags into extended, time-filling bits.
Martin Lawrence is nauseated by corpses? That’s a good 2 minutes of screentime. A dog makes a mess on Will Smith’s carpets? Definitely worthy of minutes AND a callback later.
Were they struggling to fill the runtime? Did they have zero trust in the audience to get a joke without signposting and repetition?
The action sequences are surprisingly few and poorly edited & produced, even relative to Michael Bay’s later movies. If anyone was triggered by Greedo missing Han Solo at point blank range, they will be enraged by the handful of gunfire exchanges in Bad Boys that were shot well enough to understand.
At least it’s often a looker, and Michael Bay can shoot the hell out of Will Smith. It’s easy to forget that he wasn’t a hollywood megastar before this.
I recall liking this when it came out but I can’t say why. I was right on the cusp of my film snob era and was already turning up my nose at much better genre movies. Did I just have no idea then of what a good action thriller could be? Was it just the novelty of seeing two very solid lead performances from black men in a mass market genre movie?
Strangely eager to rewatch Bad Boys II now - it has a very good chance of being the sequel that most improves upon the original.
