Bad Boys Review

Bay came from commercials and it shows in the first shot, a car on a Miami causeway lit like a perfume advertisement at magic hour. What saves the film from being only that is casting. Will Smith was a television star and Martin Lawrence was a stand up, and the two of them talk over each other with a rhythm that no screenwriter supplied, which is why the identity swap premise, a sitcom device stretched across two hours, survives at all.

Lawrence panicking in a stranger's apartment and Smith trying to coach him through it is funnier than anything in the sequels. Everything around them is filler. The heroin MacGuffin exists to move people to locations, Tea Leoni's witness is written as a prize, and the villain is a European accent in a linen suit. Bay's camera already circles actors for no reason and cuts on the beat rather than the action. It is a slick, disposable, genuinely likeable debut, and the last time he would let performers set the pace.