Bad Boys II Review

The highway chase is the argument for this film's existence. A transporter dumps cars into oncoming traffic and Bay stages it with real vehicles, real speed and enough coverage that you always know where the heroes are, which is the discipline he abandons everywhere else here. Around it sits a hundred and forty seven minutes of leering excess. The tone curdles early, in a morgue scene played for laughs over corpses, and never recovers.

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are still funny together but the script pushes them into shouting, and the running joke about Lawrence's sister dating his partner is stretched across the whole runtime. The Ecstasy plot is an excuse. The finale sends two Miami detectives to invade Cuba and drive through a shanty town, an escalation so unmoored that the film seems to have forgotten what genre it started in. Loud, mean, technically dazzling in bursts, and the clearest early evidence of what the Transformers years would look like.