Bad Boys for Life - Review

A tasteful tribute to its predecessors, with more emotional weight, but not as much fun or as original
January 22, 2020

Forget the banter between the leads. We get that in every buddy-cop retread. The hallmark of films like Bad Boys is a great Bad Guy. In this franchise the measuring stick is Johnny Tapia, the drug lord who lures our heroes to Cuba in the sequel. Here, in the third installment, we have a mother-son team of villains, and though they don't bring the charisma of Tapia, they represent an overall shift in focus from explosive fun to familial sentiment.

Don't get me wrong; we still have slow-mo diving shooters, bumping club scenes, and sleek chases, better filmed than the original, not just because of 25 years' advancement. (The original was choppy at times, cheesy at all times.) But more than anything, the Bad Boys are like volatile brothers, and anyone who's grown up watching them grow up may have come for the rumbling Porsches, but they'll appreciate the deeper bonding between them. Sometimes it doesn't feel like a Bad Boys movie. Then someone cracks a joke in a tense scene, and we remember the Boys are still boys, and Miami is their locker room.

On the whole, those cracks work. Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah aren't filming an emotional tour de force; they're just deepening the characters as veterans looking back on their careers and friendship, in a Bad Boys, winking style. What we have here is a tasteful tribute, subtle in its homage, more melodramatic than its predecessors, but not more fun or more original.

Isabel and Armando are the mother-son duo who twenty-five years ago suffered the death of their family patriarch, Mexico City cartel godfather Benito. They're plotting the slow torture of detective Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) by assassinating everyone involved in Benito's investigation. Isabel is saving Mike for last, because she wants him to see his friends die. When Armando disobeys orders and shoots him first, partner Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) is so shaken that he vows to God never to use violence again, if only Mike survives.

He does, and Marcus takes his vow seriously. The most interesting thing about the film is the running debate that this causes, and how El Arbi and Fallah refuse to under-fuel either side's argument. At Marcus' daughter's wedding, the partners fiercely try to convince the other. Their ideas on loyalty don't align.

You're going to just allow an assassin to put three bullets in my stomach and walk? Mike asks. Loyalty to him is riding together, dying together. "I spent every day in the hospital with you," Marcus answers. "I wiped the drool from your face." That's loyalty to him---nursing him back to health and keeping him healthy, even if it means keeping him out of the fray.

What also works is that this stalemate arises from both men's true character. Mike has always been the loose-cannon bachelor living for the job, Marcus the family man wanting to play it safe. You might say we are just treading the same ground, like other overstaying franchises, and you might be right. But I found it a creative catalyst. If that's sitcom, at least it's in character.

What we lack is a real Vader, Hans Gruber, even a Tapia-level villain. Armando follows the orders, for the most part, of his madre. Jacob Scipio plays him with a quiet confidence, questioning Isabel's strategy more for his own lack of independence than for her undisclosed motives. They turn out to be not so earth-shattering or innovative. She spends most of the film barking orders on the phone, surrounded by Virgin Mary statues with skeleton faces. Indeed, her ruthlessness and power invite, among the detectives, comparisons to witchery. But her plotting itself is like an incantation, more of the same. We do look forward to her confrontation with Mike, but it is short.

Yet fans will appreciate the subtlety of how this film samples its forefathers. A chase opens the movie, but its purpose surprises us. We hear the familiar tones of the score. There's a quick shot of a rat crawling with menace underneath Marcus. Mike makes an offhand comment on Gabrielle Union's absence. Reggie's treatment might not be so subtle, but his glorious scene from the sequel legitimizes his reprise here. There's plenty here for fans to enjoy, but I don't know what else besides fandom would compel you to see it.

Two point five of four