Released in 2003 to modest success, Bad Boys II seemingly only attained a kind of special infamy in pop culture and pop culture discourse after British comedy darling Edgar Wright payed homage to it with his 2007 film Hot Fuzz. Before that, it was the first box office misfire in director Michael Bay's career. His previous frenetically maximalist action films -- The Rock (1996), Armageddon (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001) -- had all done gangbusters. Bad Boys II was the first financial disappointment from the old new bad boy of the Hollywood 90's and his frequent producing partner, Jerry Bruckheimer. When Bay's follow-up, the Ewan McGregor-Scarlett Johansson sci-fi romance The Island (2005), also bit the monetary dust, to many of the commercial film industry's trade journalists and reviewers and financiers, it must have seemed like the light of the blockbuster wunderkind had faded with the rather brief but peak period where his cinema -- along with Roland Emmerich, to a lesser degree -- seemed, to many, horrifically definitive of America's gross domestic culture. Bay's career was only revitalized after he hitched his wagon to the Transformers franchise, the first episode of which was released in the same year as Hot Fuzz.
But as of this writing, even that sun seems to have set on Bay's particular auteur infamy, or seems to be at least in the process of setting. Of his only two more personal (i.e., not toy-related) films of the last twelve years -- Pain & Gain (2013) and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Bengazi (2016) -- one was only a surprise success in the same mold as the director's debut, Bad Boys (1995). Which is to say, it was produced for quite little, comparably, and thus turned a proportionately stellar profit. Whereas Bad Boys II, released eight years later, cost nearly seven times as much. The cycle recurring in 2016, 13 Hours, a mid-budget film, bombed; and even the fifth Transformer ultimately succumbed to the dread franchise fatigue, prompting a soft-reboot with the much more modestly budgeted and, surprise-surprise, much more proportionately successful Bumblebee (2018), and with Bay out of the picture as director.
The boom-and-bust of Hollywood capital goes on, sure. And a focus on Bay as a director also neglects his wearing the hat of a producer as well, where he has obviously seen his most consistent and sustained success as a filmmaker, his company Platinum Dunes cultivating talent and contributing to trends in American popular cinema in ways even his most die-hard haters aren't even aware. But there is still a distinct irony in this: That Bay's infamy along a certain strata of film discourse, increasingly populated by the terminally online and memetic, reached its peak during precisely his period of decline as a director. It was then that he became a uniquely identifiable auteur of everything wrong with American cinema and culture distilled: crypto-fascist propaganda, the voyeuristic and vile and violent lowest common denominator... whatever his films were supposed to be, so long as they weren't credible artistic projects made in compliance with the system, but never actually particularly emblematic of it.
Dwell upon the double-layer of meaning that is now imbued in the 2004 musical by South Park co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Team America: World Police, which broadly parodies the blockbuster films of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, and even features a pivotal, climactic ballad in which the protagonist asks, "Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?" The obvious answer is, "Because they make money." But over a year before, Bad Boys II just didn't make that much money, comparably. The Island outright bombed less than a year later. The actual viability and relevance of not just Bay's style of action, but of blockbuster filmmaking itself, is incredibly tenuous. It's never really that long before a bubble is popping somewhere, tens to hundreds of millions of inflated dollars basically gambled away. Bay's unique aesthetic only actually stands above the saturation if you're looking for it, but it becomes patently clear soon after that one of the governing rules of gross American blockbusters is that it's precisely what makes Bay's films stand out that prohibits them from being emblematic. He is prevented from being definitively lowest common denominator because he is clearly above the fray, artistically notable, which Trey Parker's parody must concede to the same degree as Wright's flattery.
Like all true iconoclasts, while Bay may not have ever experience a true "decline," as it were, he nonetheless went prematurely "over the hill" in a rapidly accelerating marketplace. The new breed of blockbuster mercenaries has inherited virtually none of his hyperactive aesthetic, and none of his true proteges like Marcus Nispel or Jonathan Liebesman managed to find their Transformers, though they tried. At a certain point, Bay's over-stated popular significance via joking parody and homage gives way to reappraisal of his work as, in its own way, too transgressive for blockbuster hegemony. His latest film, 6 Underground, requires too rarified a black comic sensibility, too schizophrenic a sequence of allusions to contemporary geopolitical events and recent global history, too garish a representation of Bay's signature lewdness and mayhem, to be put out by Paramount Pictures. For Bay to even keep doing what he does best, it takes the patent obscurantism of digital streaming and its incomprehensible profit motive - propping up a mini-blockbuster film on limited release and then on-demand subscription in an ever-growing library package.
A Bad Boys III had been stuck in development Hell since at least 2008, owing to the usual suspects of studio micro-management, creative differences, and scheduling conflicts. There was also the fact that, as Bay admitted early on, he as director and Will Smith as leading man would return to do a bigger, badder Boys romp only for their own bigger, badder sum. Joe Carnahan, best known for the cult ensemble action-thriller Smokin' Aces -- a Bay-contemporary, but certainly no rip-off or facsimile -- was attached to the project as late as 2015, but bowed out two years later after continued delays in production. Re-named Bad Boys for Life, the film was finally released mid-January of this year to knock-out global box office, proving that seven years wasn't enough to cool off anticipation for the next episode in the Bad Boys saga; or perhaps that particular affinity for the franchise, particularly Bad Boys II, has only continued to grow in that time, parallel to renewed appreciation of Bay's waning legacy in popular culture... Or, perhaps it's just that Will Smith can still pull in the big bucks.
But, at any rate, for Life will have made bank without Bay's Midas touch, or even a particularly notable aesthetic resemblance. Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah hail from Belgium, and their pre-Hollywood filmography is notably bereft of Bay-isms. Maybe some exec had caught their 2018 film Gangsta, which sure looks, in many ways, like a Bay rip-off. But the narratives that their films explore, their subject matter and overall approach, could not be any farther from Bay's chaotic neutral and sinister misanthropy. Whether it's Gangsta, or Black (2015) and Image (2014) before it, Adil & Bilall's films are much more accurately characterized as a synthesis of a generic international cinema du look and a more particular, "socially conscious" focus on poverty, the cultural and ethnic margins of urban Europe, and systemic violence. Think less Bay -- or an even more hilarious comparison, Guy Ritchie -- and more a flattened chimera of global influences, from Danny Boyle to Mathieu Kassovitz, Matteo Garrone to Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. Their American transition, directing the first two episodes of John Singleton's T.V. crime drama Snowfall in 2017, as well as a music video for fellow Belgians Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike that got a big up from a Wiz Khalifa feature, has been enough for Jerry Bruckheimer to tap them as stewards of not just a third Bad Boys, but also a fourth Beverly Hills Cop; a franchise that, unlike Bad Boys, has not been thought about by a single person, in praise or in jest, since before the first Bad Boys.
The cynicism of Hollywood calculus is self-evident, but as far as franchise reboots go, commuting two Belgian auteurs of Moroccan descent to resuscitate two decades old franchises about brutal black cops starring the highest profile black male leads of their generation, when all of them are cooly pushing retirement age, it has its own sensation of pleasant befuddlement. The question isn't whether Smith or Murphy can still get asses in seats. They surely can. It isn't even a question, really. It's a statement of such blank certitude that it almost sprouts a vestigial question mark, just the vain and willfully uncertain hope of whoever acknowledges it: There are no futures for these old-ass leading men, at least not in the system as it is currently constituted. They'll only ever be playing older versions of their younger selves until they keel over.
And for the up-and-comer mercenaries, Adil & Bilall themselves, their task is only to be economically efficient. Bad Boys for Life, as one of the most recent attempts in these late-stage franchise perpetuations, by default, is compromised in terms of even its own limited potential for expressive pop art. Calculated as they themselves were, Bay's films were at least of their moment, iconically extrapolating the miasmic excess of America's uncultured cruelty and decadence. Adil & Bilall's film, on the other hand, is only desperately keeping up with the moment, situated somewhere between fawning pop culture idolatry and youthful fanboyism, and the mid-life crisis of Hollywood's commercial establishment. It exudes, as all these late-stage franchise movies do, a lotus-eating senility that is far beyond post-modern self-reference, disturbingly earnest rather than nakedly ironic. The film is contractually about finding a place for old and stupid things, normalizing a false sense of continuity between generations of commodity. It's No Country for Old Men meets Fast & Furious.
Which is not to say that Adil & Bilall have not turned in a somehow admirable, even surprisingly engrossing product. They reserve their most overt homage to Bayhem in the opening sequence, Will Smith's Mike Lowrey once again behind the wheel of a swank car floor-it-ing through the streets of Miami, Martin Lawrence's Marcus Burnett once again slouched in the shotgun seat and on the verge of puking. The obvious punchline is that the two 50's detectives are just trying to make it to the birth of Marcus's grand-daughter, but from there Adil & Bilall put away cheap imitation, taking the hodgepodge script they were given and directing it less like a Michael Bay knock-off and more like one of their own more romantic, and (in relative terms) downright languid and patient crime dramas.
Bay's two films are the stuff of aesthetic maximalism pushed to a psychotic specificity, over-flowing with the lascivious imbibing of objectified women and a sense of humor that only relishes gratuitous violence, the living and the dead all mass ornaments of a unapologetic farce. Yet contrast the scene in Bad Boys II of Marcus intimately mewling to Mike about the lack of communication and sympathy in their personal and professional relationship, unaware that their conversation is being broadcast to an electronics store full of people who mistake them for homosexuals; with this one from Bad Boys for Life, a wedding between Marcus's daughter and her longtime boyfriend. In it, Mike gives a speech toasting the young couple, speaking not as an uncle, but as a co-partner, comparing their relationship and the struggles they will have to overcome, all those cliches, to that which he has with Mike. There are no mugging reactions shots in this scene, no self-awareness double takes on either Smith or Lawrence's parts. It's played absolutely straight as a bit of comic irony that doesn't reflect a sense of "gay panic," the fear by straight men of "looking / sounding gay." If anything, the joke is a winking one, a true bit of tongue-in-cheek. The scene is written and performed in such a way as to suggest to the spectator that the homoerotic subtext of all hegemonic masculine, homosocial power fantasies is not a "mistake" or "misreading," but a bit of common sense. Whereas Bay found farce in the "toxicity" of the masculine itself, inextricable from a politic order in which cops are effectively endowed to be just as ruthless as the thugs and criminals, Adil & Bilall find it in the queer juxtaposition between "progressive" cultural norms and the continued insanity of how these "humanizing" bits of melodrama are reconciled with an unflinching barbarism.
They effectively transform Bad Boys for Life into a tongue-in-cheek soap opera of blockbuster proportions. In other words, they've made a Fast & Furious knock-off. Still, with Smith as a co-producer, and thus effectively just as much an author to the film as the Adil & Bilall or Bruckheimer, there remains a psychotic enthusiasm, albeit one far more adaptable than Bay's visceral cruelty, and one that overshadows the Vin Diesel franchise's repetitiveness. Concerned with Mike's near death at the hands of a vengeance-bound sniper's bullet, how it prompts Marcus to retire and Mike on his own mission of revenge, what we are effectively presented with is a later age bildungsroman, a conflicted story about "boys becoming men," and yet still not relinquishing the sense of "the boy" as an essential safety-valve for decompressing the most toxic lengths of hegemonic masculinity. "The boy," per se, while impulsive and immature, is also innocent in the way that a grown-ass man, gallivanting around making believe he is "bulletproof," can not be. Mike must "grow up," but Marcus must realize, quite the contrary, that he is still "a boy," that he is still prepossessed to his natural drive to be surrounded by noise and bright lights and consequence-free carnage. Abbott and Costello with machine guns and grenade launchers, Smith and Lawrence's portrayal of this unified arc is surprisingly bitter-sweet and convincing.
Bay himself makes a cameo, officially co-signing this whimsical "maturation" of the franchise he began. Not amid explosions, or fast cars, or scantly clad women, but at the very wedding scene. Again, most people will have no idea who this bit-player is, though they may notice Adil & Bilall's send-off to him, which is a recreation of one of Bay's signature shots, the circular dolly around a character. With no chaos or violence implicit in the moment, the filmmakers have chosen to pay homage to the incredible dexterity of Bay's signature aesthetic. They also effectively promise the special place, the secure nook, for the old, dumb things.
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