BAD BOYS II I didn't see the first Bad Boys. When I'm on my deathbed thinking about all the time I've wasted in my life, one mitigating factor will be the realization that I didn't see Bad Boys, and I hope someone reminds me. Martin Lawrence and Will Smith play a pair of Miami cops, and they don't get along. It's the oldest formula in the book, and it's not hard to make it at least minimally entertaining. Bad Boys' innovation, and it was a good idea, was to take the white cop/black cop buddy flick formula and double the fun by making both cops black. Why not, since the black half is always the more interesting half of any armed-buddy flick. The Negro half will always kick the other race's ass: Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte, Chris Rock/Anthony Hopkins, Chris Tucker/Jackie Chan, Morgan Freeman/Brad Pitt, Samuel Jackson/John Travolta, Denzel Washington/Ethan Hawke, etc. Dumping the cracker or the winkie and substituting another Negro is like getting rid of the cake and serving up pure frosting. Or so one would think. Then the same asshole who realized that a dual-Negro buddy cop flick would double the fun canceled everything out by casting Martin Lawrence as the cop-just-about-to-retire. Anyone but Martin-fucking-Lawrence! In my life, I cannot remember a black man as grossly unfunny as Lawrence. He makes J.J. "Dynamite" Walker look like a comic genius by comparison...and yet for some reason Lawrence behaves, and gets treated, like he's the second incarnation of Eddie Murphy, the old Eddie Murphy. In the annals of Negroidal comedy, the only figure who comes close to Lawrence for sheer unfunniness is Sinbad. But Sinbad never graduated from the TV tube, and he would have had the decency to defer to a far greater talent like Will Smith, whom Lawrence defiantly, abrasively smothers. So that's what's wrong with the movie aesthetically. The Martin Lawrence Factor. Then there's the sick morality of the film. The evil, of course, is drugs - what else is there to demonize these days but drugs and terrorists, and terrorism suddenly got too real-life evil for Hollywood to make it the backdrop to a buddy flick. So drugs will have to do. In this movie, the evil drug is Ecstasy, which is linked to the KKK, cross-burning, and teenage death. In the first scene, a massive shipment of X leaves from Amsterdam bound for Miami. The cops and the DEA get wind of the shipment, so they plan a sting at the dock, where a cross-burning happens to be in progress..Lawrence and Smith join the KKK cross-burning undercover, and you can imagine the hijinks that ensue when our heroes' hoods get pulled off. Here's a hint: Lawrence gets shot in the ass, and there are about 5,000,000 subsequent jokes about him getting shot in the ass, not a single one of which is accompanied by a toilet-plunger-over-the-trumpet-horn, because at least that would've been funny.
Another thing we learn early in the movie: Black Flag's Henry Rollins plays the DEA team leader. And he's playing it straight. For the money. As far as I can tell, Henry Rollins is the DEA. Hell, he killed Black Flag when he joined them, he may as well kill everyone else's high while he's at it. Some of his fans might have found it ironic to see him playing a DEA goon in a anti-drug mainstream movie, but that just proves again what gullible idiots they are. About 20 minutes into the movie, we realize that only a small portion of the X was confiscated in the sting, and the real drop-off was made somewhere else. We see how the drug is brought into a nightclub's secret red-lit office, distributed by a greasy Cuban club owner, and then passed, quite literally, from the mouth of one bisexual raver kid to another...until finally, some thin artfag looking kid goes into convulsions and dies. Now this myth about lethal ecstasy has already been disproved. Just to remind you, a Dr. George Ricaurte of Johns Hopkins Medical School published a study in the late 90s, massively backed by the DEA, that helped give scientific weight to the myth that ecstasy kills. Specifically, he proved that 4 of 10 rats given ecstasy died on the spot, and everyone in the U.S. believed it instinctively. A group of British scientists realized that this finding defied logic - tens of millions of Eurofags dropped E and danced to techno every weekend, and not a single one of them died. So the Brit scientists spent years trying to replicate Ricaurte experiment, and failed repeatedly. When they checked Ricaurte's actual experiments, they found that he had not used ecstasy but rather a powerful, highly concentrated methamphetamine which was injected directly into the rats and blew up their hearts. Ricaurte was forced to make the unprecedented admission of his error to his colleagues in Nature magazine.But to the public, whom he'd intentionally deceived, he said, "I'm a scientist, not a chemist."
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