The Bad Boys Are Back In Town

Nearly 17 years after their last adventure, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith reunite for a threequel that's better than it has any business being

The evolution of the “Bad Boys” franchise is a sight to behold. The original, released in 1995, was a hard-hitting buddy cop vehicle featuring two of the hottest young TV stars at the time. They were teamed with a promising action director in Michael Bay and while the movie didn’t set the world on fire, it turned a profit healthy enough to establish Will Smith as a big screen leading man a year before “Independence Day” would blow him into the stratosphere. “Bad Boys II” perfectly embodied the age-old sequel adage of being bigger, badder and louder. While some of the action staging was admittedly top notch and several big jokes hit their mark, it was nearly swallowed by its own excesses. It was unnecessarily vulgar, incessantly juvenile and ridiculously cartoonish. It hasn't aged particularly well and perhaps its brand of "fun" deserved to be left back in 2003.

Consequently, I’ll be the first to admit I was rather leery of this sequel. It had all the signs of a potential disaster; a significant gap between it and its predecessor, a pair of aging stars who are neither in the prime of their careers or their physical primes, multiple pre-production false starts, various script rewrites and a January release date. For those of you not in the know, January has been a notorious Hollywood dumping ground for decades. Despite those red flags, the film is actually a thoroughly enjoyable two-hour actioner. The dynamic duo of Martin Lawrence and Will Smith still have great on-screen chemistry, which is impressive considering Lawrence hasn't done much acting in the past decade. While the script often makes light of the fact these two are now 50 year olds, it also offers a few opportunities to seriously ponder how much gas they have left in the tank. In the same breath, new adversaries with a vendetta against Smith's Mike Lowrey emerge and he’ll need all the help he can get from old (Joe Pantoliano) and new allies (Paola Nunez, Vanessa Hudgens, Charles Melton and more) to make it out alive.

With handfuls of quieter moments and an underlying theme of family interwoven throughout, the story is surprisingly weightier than a movie like this even requires. Martin and Will are asked to flex certain acting muscles they haven’t ever used in the franchise before and it’s honestly a nice change of pace. In addition, the Belgium directing duo of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah do their best Michael Bay impression in delivering big action sequences, but they do scale things down a few notches. While the climax does disintegrate into a giant effects-laden fireball, a large chunk of the setpieces appear to have been executed as practically as possible. Overall, “Bad Boys For Life” is a welcome throwback. It’s silly, action-packed and leaner than the previous installment, shedding some of the cruder elements and gratuitousness. Some of the humor is hit-and-miss and there’s a late-game swerve that’s a little wacky, but it still manages to be a satisfyingly entertaining piece of escapist cinema. B-