Michael Bay might have established an entirely unique form of filmmaking that bears his name, but the creator and architect of Bayhem has never managed to top the unbridled insanity that he brought to the table in Bad Boys II.
He’s made better films before and since, while he’s definitely delivered significantly worse as his five-film stint at the helm of the Transformers franchise makes painfully clear, but no feature has distilled the best and worst of his tendencies, signatures, and essence than Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s second outing as the bickering buddy cop duo.
It’s at least half an hour too long at 147 minutes, and just when you think the most recent action sequence is surely the grand finale, along comes another one to cause even more carnage and chaos. As you can imagine, critics were left distinctly unimpressed by the end result, but the fact Bad Boys II‘s 23 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is comfortably dwarfed by a 78 percent audience average just goes to show that the relentlessly excessive extravaganza went straight into the hearts and minds of its target audience.
Next year marks the 20th anniversary of its release, and yet it’s hard to conjure up any blockbuster with a budget north of $100 million that’s thrown its balls quite so fiercely to the wall, abandoned all semblance of restraint, and simply gone for broke.
That might be because nobody could even come close, with the fact FlixPatrol has revealed Bad Boys II to be one of the most-watched movies on both Paramount Plus and iTunes heading into the weekend making it clear that it’s more than capable of bringing in old and new fans alike on-demand.
