BAD BOYS II
Crass and crasser.
Running time: 146 minutes. Rated R (gore, violence, profanity, sex). At the Astor Plaza, the Chelsea West, the Union Square, others.
‘BAD Boys II” more than lives up to the first word in the title – it’s a vile, noisy, excessive, pandering and seemingly endless follow-up to the modest 1995 buddy-cop hit starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.
In the hands of returning uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay (in their first collaboration since the infamous “Pearl Harbor”), the belated sequel has been pumped up more than Smith’s pecs.
But it’s basically the longest (a butt-numbing 2½ hours), the most expensive (a reportedly obscene $150 million), most vulgar and by far the stupidest episode of “Miami Vice” ever.
Burnett (Lawrence) and Lowrey (Smith) are still police undercover agents in Miami, and they’re still bickering.
Their relationship worsens when Lowrey shoots Burnett in the rear end when they remove their white robes to interrupt a Ku Klux Klan meeting – and are in turn interrupted by a shootout involving drug dealers and the first of the movie’s enervatingly interminable stunt sequences.
A fed-up Burnett has put in for a transfer – and he doesn’t even know that his partner has made a secret booty call to his kid sister Syd (Gabrielle Union), also an undercover agent, in New York.
Now she’s in Miami posing as the girlfriend/major-domo of Tapia (Jordi Molla), a Latin drug lord (the worst of the movie’s many offensive ethnic stereotypes) who’s smuggling money and drugs between Miami and Cuba in coffins and dead bodies.
Burnett and Lowery are also pursuing Tapia, and the chase isn’t pretty, especially when you have corpses landing on car windows during high-speed chases and Lowery frisking the internal organs of cadavers.
The filmmakers show no restraint whatosever, racking up a truly sickening body count and at one point throwing in a scene of rats fornicating.
Even when they come up with a semi-clever idea – as when the bad guys launch a truck full of cars into oncoming traffic for maximum carnage during a freeway chase – the scene goes on for so long that your eyes glaze over and your eardrums protest.
While Smith and Lawrence have an undeniable comic rapport, their comic scenes tend to go on long after they stop being funny.
Lawrence has one hilarious bit where his character grills his young daughter’s terrified first date, but another scene – where he lurches around the apartment of his exasperated boss (Joe Pantoliano) while under the influence of Ecstasy – sorely calls out for someone to yell “cut.”
An extended sequence in which Lowrey and Burnett are taken for gay is even less hilarious than the filmmakers – who, after making a series of PG-13 flicks, wallow in gore and bad taste like drunken sailors on shore leave – seem to think.
Except for the leads and Peter Stormare as a Russian mobster, the actors play second fiddle to explosions and car crashes.
Union, so funny in “Deliver Us From Eva,” has less to do as Syd than Eva Mendes in the virtually identical role in “2 Fast 2 Furious,” while Theresa Randall, who had a substantial part as Burnett’s wife in the original, is reduced to a cameo.
This is a movie that just doesn’t know when to stop. When Syd is kidnapped, the partners literally invade Cuba, blow up Tapia’s mansion, drive through the flaming ruins in a Hummer – and lay waste to an entire village.
Small wonder Bay and Bruckheimer didn’t have them liberate Cuba from Fidel Castro while they were at it.
Even in a town as cynical as Hollywood, “Bad Boys II” marks a new low in contempt for the public’s intelligence.