The latest in our series of writers sharing their comfort watches celebrates Will Smith and Martin Lawrence's ground-breaking action comedy.
Sitcoms Martin and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were still on the air when Bad Boys hit theatres 30 years ago. Their leading men, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, respectively, brought a lot of that goofy small-screen banter - this time loaded with testosterone and F-bombs - to a buddy cop movie.
Bad Boys opens with an announcement of their arrival. Lawrence's Marcus Burnett and Smith's Mike Lowrey are cruising around Miami in a Porsche 911, doing a sitcom bit as they bicker over French fries and cupholders, before a pair of car thieves catch them by surprise and hold them up at gunpoint. When Smith's Mike warns that they're cops, one of the car jackers dismisses him - "Well, I'm a stand-up comedian, and I suck" - as if speaking for an audience unconvinced that these two comic personalities could plausibly exist in their new roles.
An elbow to the head and kick to the groin later - Smith and Lawrence making a trope-y takedown appear convincingly cool - leaves that same doubter laid flat, looking up at Will Smith as he calmly points a gun at him (and the audience) while responding: "Now, let's hear one of them jokes, bitch."
For any kid like myself weaned on Martin and Fresh Prince - for whom the latter especially would dictate our fashion sense and goofball sensibilities - that moment landed like an exhilarating coming-of-age. Our household icon just graduated to badass movie-star status, even growing his baby mustache into a goatee, while basking in the golden hues director Michael Bay, in his feature-film debut, would bathe him in. It's a feeling I first experienced as a 13-year-old sneaking into a very R-rated movie on opening day, and relive every time I revisit Bad Boys - whether in whole or just the part when Smith’s sprinting through Miami streets in slow motion, his shirt open to reveal a glistening Adonis-like physique.
Sure, Bad Boys is riddled with cliches and groaners. It's a formulaic action movie about two narcotics detectives hunting down heroin stolen from their own precinct. They have to role-play as each other because of a contrived plot device involving a witness (Téa Leoni, also fabulous) whose desperate demands set up the duplicity. But Smith and Lawrence make all the flaws go down easy, needling each other with their hilarious rapport, while Leoni easily holds her own against the comic stars.
Bay elevates the material with his high-adrenaline opulence. The director's swooping slow-motion camera work and operatic low-angle shots of action heroes as gods would reach parodic levels in follow-up movies like The Island, Transformers and even Bad Boys II. But in his first time out, Bay's bombastic aesthetic (with some shots and production design elements lifted from his music video for Meatloaf's I'll Do Anything for Love) was an exciting calling card for a director who would later be referred to as a vulgar auteur. Who else would stage a splashy bathroom brawl, where heads are smashed into urinals, with gothic romantic candlelight?
Instead of drowning out his stars with this maximalism, Bay’s style instead puts them on a pedestal. That feels especially ground-breaking since this was the rare studio action movie at the time starring not one but two Black leads.
Before Bad Boys, buddy-cop movies favored the tempered chocolate-and-vanilla pairings of 48 Hrs. (Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte), Lethal Weapon (Danny Glover and Mel Gibson) and The Last Boy Scout (Damon Wayans and Bruce Willis). That wouldn't have worked for a premise, originally conceived as a comedy for SNL stars Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, where the two stars have to swap identities.
Casting both Smith and Lawrence, and giving them the room to make the movie completely their own, set the stage for an action movie with distinct swagger, transcending the way Black-led movies at the time were pigeon-holed as strictly for "urban" audiences. The hip-hop, R&B and dancehall on the soundtrack added to that sensation, pairing tracks from 2Pac, Warren G, Babyface, Diana King and Ini Kamoze with Mark Mancina's adrenaline rush of a score (that man went hard on those strings!).
Lawrence and Smith clearly understood what it meant for them to step up to these roles, and take up that rarified space, which is why throughout Bad Boys they keep paying homage to those who came before them. "Wesley Snipes, Passenger 57!" Lawrence yells out in that opening announcing their arrival, following that up with comically timed shout-outs to Shaft, Action Jackson and Jim Brown, the former football star who starred in The Dirty Dozen and 100 Rifles.
These were the Black action heroes that Smith and Lawrence grew up with, just as we would grow up with them.