The Simpson-Bruckheimer action recipe is like cinematic comfort food for the adrenaline starved. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence serve up an explosive bowl of macaroni and cheese in “Bad Boys for Life” (2020). Twenty-five years after the first installment of the franchise, cars still explode at the slightest provocation, guns still have unlimited bullets and helicopters still helicopt. Also, bad guys still can’t shoot worth a damn and story lines still take a backseat to blowing shit up. This time Smith’s Mike Lowrey has some kind of Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader thing going on. Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter.
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In 1984, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer made a movie with no helicopters. Not a single goddamn thing blows up. “Thief of Hearts” is an erotic thriller in which Steven Bauer robs a suburban couple’s house, then seduces the wife, all while looking extremely pretty. (The opposite of pretty? Bauer’s crime partner, a young David Caruso.) A couple more sex scenes and it would have been perfect for the Friday night 11:30 timeslot on Skinemax. But there aren’t. And it isn’t. It was the lowest-grossing film Simpson/Bruckheimer ever made. Their next effort was “Beverly Hills Cop.” The rest is history.
Tea Leoni, action hero. That’s my big takeaway from “Bad Boys” (1995). It’s a typical Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay shootemup, with explosions, helicopters and Tcheky Karyo as the cliche foreign bad guy. Oh, and there’s Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as Mutt-and-Jeff detectives with blazing guns and wacky banter. Smith is good. Lawrence, as usual, is too much of a good thing. Joe Pantoliano is in it, too, as the cliche harried captain of maverick cops who play by their own sets of rules. Speaking of Pantoliano, Leoni’s real last name is Pantaleoni, and she wears the big-boy pants here.
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