As a movie, this really made a good preview. With most comedies nowadays people complain "all the funniest parts were in the preview." Since this was supposed to be both funny and an action film, all the funniest bits and most exciting bits made their way to the preview, leaving those who bought tickets to the whole film to contend with one snail's paced bundle of bad writing and poor direction with some piss-poor acting thrown in as an added bonus.
This has got to be the best example of lousy screen-writing this year. With more talk than Before Sunrise and a plot that sounds like something from "Three's Company," there are references to the likes of Shaft, Action Jackson, and Jim Brown but this movie lacks anything that made those films worth watching.
Long-winded and chocked full of cliches; you've got every cop/buddy staple present and accounted for with the heaviest borrowing coming from the 100% original (right) Lethal Weapon—chasing the bad guys' car on foot, a broken fish tank, the married cops' family in danger, and a totally unsympathetic witness.
Remember Joe Pesci's Leo Getz character? Well, move over rover, and let Tea Leone take over. At least Pesci is an actor, Leone couldn't act her way out of the proverbial paper bag. Even simple blank facial expressions looked like they were forced and she stayed with one vocal style—the scared witness—throughout the whole picture.
Eventually, I wanted her to die and this film provided a great opportunity for the blessed event to occur but it was chickenshit. Toward the end the bad guys (the under-developed chief badie with his European accent of unrecognizable origin in tact) catch up to Leone. Now, all she is to them is a witness who could testify against them. But instead of just putting a gun to her head and blowing her face off (overbite and all), they take her hostage. What the fuck? Martin Lawrence and Will Smith weren't that attached to her (and I know I wasn't) so why give a rat's ass about saving her? Especially since witnesses are never important in these movies anyway. The heroes always supercede the justice system and blow all the bad guys away: there's never any trials for testimony to be given! The only reason to save her is to comply to that old "they've got one of ours hostage" cliche.
Other cliches include; one of the heroes getting shot in a non-fatal area (the leg), saying clever things before shooting their guns (the more clever, the more important the villan), the other two cops who trade wisecracks with the main partners (see Running Scared and Stakeout for good examples—and fine films), riding on top of a speeding car, et cetera.
Bad Boys was heavy on dialogue (insipid, excessive, and some of it Tarantino-inspired [not a dis] with inane references to pop culture --"I Love Lucy" et al.), Tony Scott mise-en-scene, and John Woo slo-mo. It would've run about fifteen minutes shorter if everything had been shot at twenty-four fps. In fact, the whole film felt like it was in slow motion. This was the slowest pace inaction film I have ever seen: in one scene we see the seeds of the "Three's Company" misunderstanding planted and then it took five scenes for it to be explained to every other main character in the film.
If this film teaches us anything, it's that ether is explosive and plentiful. It shows up in the most unexpected places, like airplane hangers.