Bad Boys (1995)

WHATCHA GONNA DO?

We all know about the buddy cop movie formula, right? That thing where two mismatched individuals get put together to solve a crime within an allotted time limit, where their initial hostility towards each other is overcome by working together on a common problem. Both don’t even have to be cops for it to work. It can be Cop/Cop (Lethal Weapon), Cop/Criminal (48 Hrs), Cop/Child (Cop and a Half), Cop/Dog (Turner & Hooch), Cop/Alien (Alien Nation)… as long as they have two conflicting personalities, then it’s all good. For the feature debut of Michael Bay, he turned his hand to this type of story. Two cops: one family man; one playboy. For this, they brought together two of the hippest comedy actors to let the bullets and cool quips fly.

When a massive amount of drugs is stolen directly from police headquarters, Detectives Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowery (Will Smith) are given 72 hours to find those responsible and get the drugs back before the Internal Affairs division steps in. When a friend of Mike’s winds up being killed by the very people responsible, a witness comes forward, Julie Mott (Téa Leoni), but she’ll only deal with Mike. When Mike isn’t around, Marcus is forced to pretend to be Mike to secure the witness and find their way to the bad guys.

There’s something of a weird journey as to how Bad Boys came to being. The legendary producer partnership of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson was working on a property called Bulletproof Hearts, a cop buddy movie comedy set to star Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, who were both riding high on their popularity on Saturday Night Live. Both actors were all ready to get things rolling, but before they got started, Simpson wanted to take them both to Las Vegas for a celebratory blowout, a big party to mark the beginnings of their journey. Now, for those that don’t know, Don Simpson was renowned for his wild excess and hedonistic extravagance. Believe me, if only a quarter of the stories I’ve read about him are true, the guy was a lunatic. Such was his apparently wild ways that Carvey backed out completely, wanting nothing to do with Simpson. This threw the project back down again, leaving Bruckheimer and Simpson to begin searching for their lead pair again, since Lovitz had already begun to lose some of his popularity by this point. As it is, they weren’t exactly broken up about the experience. They had similar problems with another project about 10 years before with Sylvester Stallone… but we’ll get to that one on another day. So, they went on the hunt for new stars, and to find a director to bring them a big box office smash - enter Michael Bay.

This was indeed Michael Bay’s first feature film, although he wasn’t exactly struggling to break into the industry when someone decided to take a chance on an enthusiastic youngster. Bay was already a very successful director of music videos and television commercials when Bruckheimer and Simpson tapped him for the job. Likely they were both very impressed with his visual style and flair (it’s the one thing even the most avid Bay-hater must concede), though I imagine it was Simpson who felt most drawn to Bay’s talent for heavy stylisation and excess. However, it’s clearly in film that he wanted to work, the place where everything can be bigger. When Bay came aboard, he became quite instrumental in assembling the right pieces for the picture, and helping to point things in the right direction. Yes, for all of his inanity, he really can set a fine table before blowing the merry hell out of it. For example, it was Bay’s choice to bring Will Smith on board, which automatically increased the cool credibility and style of the film by about 42%. When both Smith and Martin Lawrence were solidified as the new leads, the script was rewritten to reflect the new talent on offer. However, that’s where things fall flat.

The script is either stupid, dull or just by-the-numbers. As I mentioned before, Bad Boys is a buddy cop movie, but never strays from this formulaic approach. This could be because it had to be rewritten for a whole new approach and new actors, so they simply fell back on cliché and stock characters to pad things out and get it finished. And it’s so unnecessarily complicated and stupid. Go back up and read that plot synopsis for a second… Drugs stolen directly from police headquarters, which required someone to dress as a cop only to be killed as a distraction? Why? The murder attracts one helicopter and a few patrol cars, which is hardly representative of a whole police force. The actual robbery itself is complete bullshit. For example, when the thieves want to get into the evidence cage, it’s locked with a padlock and chain. As such, they spray the padlock with a freezing substance and shatter it. However, the thing they use to shatter the lock is a bolt-cutter, which could have broken the padlock just as easily. Later on, a hooker friend of one of the investigating detectives is murdered by the same people responsible. When the bad guy, Fouchet, shoots her, he does it through a cushion to muffle the sound. However, he then orders one of his own men shot, but no cushion is used. When the gang spot Julie hiding in the balcony above, they all start blasting away, sans silencers. If you didn’t care about the noisy gunfire, why bother with the cushion in the first place? And why leave such clear evidence of the drugs heist in the room when you leave? When Mike discovers his friend’s death, he has a more personal motivation in finding the killer, because it’s not enough that he should just want to do his job. But then why have his whole speech about how seriously he takes the job? Surely this would be the golden opportunity to prove, once and for all, that he is more dedicated than anyone to catching criminals. This personal angle is unnecessary, formulaic and compromises this earlier scene. Giving him his due, though, even Bay hated the script, telling both Smith and Lawrence to improvise around the gist of what the film needed rather than follow the dialogue they had been given.

The characters themselves are all straight out of the handbook on hack writing. Comically mismatched partners? Check. Gruff, angry Captain who yells a lot? Check. Foreign bad guy? Check. Internal Affairs breathing down everyone’s neck? Check. One cop always going on about how he sees so little of his wife? Check. If it weren’t for the strong and energetic performances from Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, this would be one dry film. However, one of the biggest crimes is the character of Julie Mott, played by Téa Leoni. She is skull-crushingly stupid. After having just seen her best friend murdered in front of her eyes, she calls the cops to say that she will only testify if she deals exclusively with a detective she has never seen (though he has been vaguely described to her), and if she doesn’t get this, she’ll run… I’m sorry, what? I understand the need to find a safe place, but she just said she’s basically letting her friend’s murderer get away. Considering she spends the rest of the movie crying about how she loved her friend, or trying to get people to acknowledge the tragedy, or trying to get her own revenge, deciding that she’s going to up sticks unless she gets her way is just bizarre. In the scene where she decides to follow the detectives into a bar where the bad guys hang out and kill them herself is idiotic on its own, but to then spend the ensuing gunfight and car chase screaming about how ‘this isn’t safe’ is a stupidity that is just jaw-dropping. She actually yells at Mike and Marcus, who are busy dodging bullets and other cars at the time, “You call this protective custody?” No, they don’t call this protective custody. They told you to stay safely ensconced at Mike’s place. Just stay there, that’s it. You decided to steal a gun and follow them into the crowded, noisy bullet-fest. And every time they tell her to stay put, she wanders off, complaining that’s she being treated more like a prisoner than the one that's responsible for the death of her best blah blah blah blah… goddamn, I’m sick of it. And there’s such a weird ambiguity to some parts. There are times where you think that perhaps she knows that Mike and Marcus have swapped places, but this occasionally gives the feeling that she’s not exactly the nicest of people. Back at Mike’s place with Marcus, post-gunfight, she alludes to the whole endeavour making her feel a bit horny, which then segues into her talking about how Mike’s “wife” will likely be getting satisfied by such a strong, take-charge kind of man. Now, it could be that she honestly doesn’t know, and is just babbling about all this, in which case she really is an idiot. Or, as the slight smirk on Leoni’s face would suggest, she does know, and is just messing with Marcus’ mind because… she’s kind of a cruel bitch. The guy has literally just saved your life and got you to a safehouse, and your reaction is to suggest to him that his friend is having sex with his wife? What the hell is wrong with you?

I could go on, but I’ll stop now to make my more general point. All of these details - the crappy characterisation, the idiotic plotting, the abysmal dialogue, the overall desire to make things look good rather than make sense - go towards establishing something rather common in Michael Bay films, which I harped on about quite a bit in talking about Armageddon. Bay’s films only work if you disengage your brain completely from what you’re watching. Now, I’m fine with big silly entertainment, but there is a big difference between silly and stupid. I know that, sometimes all you want is for something to wash over you, go boom-bang-zoom-splat and that’s the end of it. However, with Michael Bay’s work, by using even a little common sense or a modicum of logic on proceedings, you end up completely unravelling everything. The best you can hope for are some nice visuals and a heavy dose of onscreen charisma. If you get it, great; but if you don’t, it’s a hollow, disposable nothing. You can get some entertainment from these films, but they ultimately take from you much more than they give.

Bad Boys is sort of enjoyable enough as a dumb action movie, but it really can only exist as such. Despite a great show from the two leads, as well as a handful of good supporting turns, particularly from Joe Pantoliano, the whole thing is blitheringly stupid. The story is unnecessarily convoluted, numerous shots and actions make absolutely no sense, and the character of Julie is so unbelievably brainless that it’s amazing to believe that such a character made it onscreen without at least one person raising concerns. Once again, it’s a Michael Bay movie that requires the absolute least amount of cerebral activity. Just watch, laugh, and smile giddily when things go boom and we’ll see you all for Bad Boys II… oh Christ.

Armageddon (1998)

FOR LOVE. FOR HONOUR. FOR MANKIND.

Michael Bay. For many, this man is the Devil. A Devil made of overblown visual excess, superfast editing, heavy stylisation and heavy-handed patriotic images that seems to want to pound the merry hell out of the viewer’s brain, forcing it into submission. He’s also one of the most bankable directors on the face of the planet. He may spend an absurd amount of money on his films, but he makes it all back and more. In 1998, he released one of his most successful films ever, a disaster movie about an asteroid heading for Earth and total destruction. The fact that another similarly-themed film came out only a couple of months prior did little to diminish its business. Michael Bay had more zoom, more bang, more Bruce Willis saving the world. And thus, like the Devil would, Michael Bay brought us Armageddon.

A meteorite the size of Texas is heading towards Earth, and will destroy all life on the planet. With only eighteen days until impact, NASA come up with a plan to fly out the rock, drill to the core and blow it apart with a nuclear bomb. To do this, they enlist the help of Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), the world’s best deep core driller, to train their astronauts for the job. However, Harry thinks the astronauts can’t be trained in time, and decides to take his own crew and do the job himself.

I’ll be honest, it’s a bit unfair to be laying all this blame at Michael Bay’s feet. Equally as guilty of pushing the much-lamented line of overblown Hollywood excess is über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer. They’ve had a steady partnership since Bay’s feature debut with 1995’s Bad Boys and, between the two of them, they have racked up an impressive list of big budget smash hits ever since. In fact, Bad Boys is the film that did the least amount of business, only managing to make around $141 million from a $19 million budget… that’s, uh… that’s some failure there. Since then the budgets skyrocketed, with Armageddon’s (coincidentally) being around $140 million, with a final box office of just over $553 million. Good lord, that is a lot of money. It’s with such numbers that Michael Bay has always felt that he can effectively counter any criticisms about the quality of his films. After all, if the film’s were really so bad, how can they be making so much money? And even if he did accept what critics say of his work, he’d be drying his artistic tears with $100 bills. Such is his life. Now, enough of all this financial talk. What’s Armageddon really like?

We’ll leave the visuals aside for now and look at the script itself first… Armageddon is stupid, insultingly so. Whilst the premise of an asteroid hurtling towards Earth with global annihilation on its mind is hardly far-fetched, the stuff that comes after it is wilfully ridiculous. In fact, this stupidity is so deep-rooted in the film, it actively tries to make people stupid by fostering a rather unsubtle form of anti-intellectualism. Watching it, there’s a common element that is returned to over and over again throughout: smart people are dumb, and the common man always knows better. The idea that sending a crew of deep core drillers into space to tunnel into a meteorite is insane. They do initially suggest that qualified astronauts, who have already been training for eight months for a (coincidentally) similar space drilling mission, receive some extra guidance from Stamper on the best way to proceed. However, since Stamper says that it takes a lifetime to know how to become a real roughneck, he makes the call that it would be easier to train drillers how to astronaut than training astronauts how to drill. That’s ridiculous. On this point, there is a story that, supposedly, when Ben Affleck was discussing the script with Michael Bay, he questioned the logic in this point. Michael Bay’s response? “Shut up.” Of course, this offers up further questions, like what kind of response is that to a perfectly legitimate point? Why wasn’t this point discussed further? Why did Affleck agree to do the film if that’s the answers he gets to basic questions of story logic?

Bay has actually openly talked about how the film’s solution doesn’t really make sense, and that many aspects of the film’s relationship with reality are nonsense. For example, why are there so many massive explosions and fires in space? Where’s all this convenient gravity coming from? Why are the communications signals using a separate, weaker satellite to transmit than the weapons remote? Why do both driller vehicles have machine guns? Apparently, the filmmakers were aware of all of these problems and inaccuracies and holes in the film, but chose to leave them be because it would make it more entertaining, and that your average film goer doesn’t know enough about these things to be able to really question them… and this is how we come to something close to an answer as to why Michael Bay seems to hate intelligence. The less you know, the more receptive to this kind of agonising drivel you are. And Bay compounds this by repeatedly suggesting that the smart people are idiots, easily outclassed with straight-talking and "common sense". In Armageddon, Jason Issacs plays a NASA scientist and is introduced as “pretty much the smartest man in the world.” However, even he is left looking sheepish after only a few minutes with Harry Stamper, who puts down his technical capabilities and seems shocked that this big-time smart NASA science guy can’t come up with anything better than a one-shot drilling expedition to save humanity. That’s why Stamper gets on so well with Billy Bob Thornton’s Dan Truman. He may be a smart engineer guy, but they’re cut from the same straight-talking, “just the facts, ma’am” kind of cloth. The rest of the NASA boys all seem to be sweating a lot and on the point of nervous breakdown, which sits in remarkable contrast to how we saw things not too long ago in Apollo 13. Those guys knew the stakes, but they also knew that staying calm and rational was the best way to approach a crisis.

There are a few concessions made towards allowing smart people to have some kind of dignity. Amongst the crew that Stamper selects to take with him are Oscar Choice, a brilliant geologist played by Owen Wilson, and Rockhound, another geologist and certified genius played by Steve Buscemi. However, their dignity does not last long. Oscar never really gets to show how smart he is, since he doesn’t last long on the flight. Rockhound, so named because he’s constantly horny (and the closest we’ll get to a live-action Quagmire from Family Guy), ends up going nuts with space dementia and has to be physically taped up after he starts shooting the superfluous machine gun. The fact that these guys are said to be very smart is really just so we don’t question why they’re being allowed to go along on this mission, but it’s just so transparent. It all actually reminds me of old cartoons from the 1980s like Inhumanoids and The Centurions. Those shows were full of hero characters said to be accomplished chess players and military strategists and thrill-seeking master chemists, and all for a show that was just about people fighting monsters in spacesuits. The ridiculous character bios were just something to make it “more plausible”. The difference is that those cartoons actually put forward the idea that being smart was a good thing, whereas Armageddon will only let you be smart if you don’t ask questions about the plot and have some sort of other serious character flaw, like being a sex-pest or a corpse.

Okay… now the visuals. The special effects are superb. Honestly, they are really very good. They should be, it’s a Michael Bay film and that’s what he does best. We’ll have to just accept that with great effects come great stretches on the limitations of movie physics, such as the fact that the world seems to be in a near perpetual state of sunset. I understand that Bay likes sunsets, because they look cool. And they do. However, if you’re going to show a short montage of moments from around the world, how in the hell can every country be at sunset at the same time? Also, Bay has this thing of constantly moving the camera, sliding from side-to-side or, his favourite, moving the camera around the character as they turn in the opposite direction whilst in slow-motion. It’s cool to look at, but it does speak to a weird sort of visual hyperactivity that many find unsettling.

Yet another disagreeable thing that bubbles up out of this film: in the first ten minutes, it’s really quite racist. Just look at the scene in which the first wave of smaller meteorites hammers New York City. Eddie Griffin appears as a bike messenger with a small dog called Reggie and, I swear to God, you could replace every single one of his lines with “Aw shiiit, son!” When Griffin has a run-in with a Samoan street vendor, Eddie unloads a light bit of racial abuse (“If I wasn’t a Christian, I’d be throwing your fat, pineapple-eatin’ ass through the window!”). Then there’s Mark Curry, who plays a cab driver and, once again, he might as well be saying “Aw shiiit, son!” over and over. His passengers, an Asian couple, aren’t much better. The husband never says a word, but his wife speaks in deliberate stunted English “I! Want! To Go! Shopping!” Christ, what the hell is this? Armageddon was the highest grossing film of 1998, and it has this kind of crap in it? If you can reduce most of your characters’ dialogue to a single stereotypical catchphrase without losing any hint of personality or affecting proceedings in the slightest, you know you done wrong. Even Peter Stormare doesn’t seem to be playing a Russian cosmonaut so much as a thick Russian accent that happens to be wrapped in a cosmonaut. However, he’s okay because he’s just a regular guy, who fixes multi-million dollar pieces of equipment by cracking it with a wrench and yelling at it.

The performances themselves are okay, though nothing really goes beyond that. There is one performance that really drags things down, and that is Affleck. Now, I’ll admit to being something a fan of the guy. Kind of. I like him in a few things and I certainly think he gets more flak than he really deserves. However, almost every scene with him here is either way overblown or it seems like they just interrupted him having soup in order to film. So he’s either cocky in a uncommitted kind of way, or he commits too much, shooting way over the pitch of everyone else. Maybe at some point, he asked Michael Bay for direction and got told to shut up again.

Was there anything I even liked about it?… the music was pretty good, all stirring and effectively drawn. As I said, the effects were good, and so was the sound… hmmm…

Armageddon is unbelievably stupid. It makes little to no sense, most of the acting is of a standard no higher than alright, and it shows a level of ignorance on so many things that it’s actually rather impressive in its scale. What’s worse is that the film actually relies on its audience being more stupid than itself, actively encouraging them to distance themselves from logic, intelligence and basic common sense. It’s a hateful film, and no amount of Bruce Willis as The Great American Jesus stuff will put this right anytime soon.