A more than acceptable continuation of the BAD BOYS franchise: cops & cartel stuff, fast, violent & goofy. Fourth in the series that began in 1995, sequeled in 2003, rebooted in 2020 and remains a hipster’s take on LETHAL WEAPON, the Mel Gibson/Danny Glover Black/White buddy/buddy cop actioner that came out in 1987. Though with both cops Black, the character parallels are a bit blurry. Here, Will Smith plays Glover’s sobersided big brother to Martin Lawrence who steals the film as the Mel Gibson wild card. Movie Mel Gibson, that is. In real-life Mel's more in Will Smith territory after Hollywood’s most non-threatening Black ‘cool bro.’ a go-to model family man, already teetering on scandal (longtime marriage a sham?; nepo-son a personification of Hollywood entitlement) brought on his own thunderbolt when he won an Oscar® and infamously dealt a slap-heard-round-the-world, erasing three decades of sassy good will in a nano-second. This career-redemption (BAD BOYS: THE HAIL MARY PASS?) showing up two years after a sacrificed film (EMANCIPATION), is more test drive than anything else, triumphantly proving Smith’s the smoothest PR damage-control operator in the biz. (Compare Smith's repair job to the on-going disaster of LETHAL WEAPON’s Mel Gibson handling his damage control). And the film, you ask? One of those Drug Cartel insider jobs with the expected overblown pyro-technics (the finale goes on forever), but there’s a surprisingly tight house-bound battle by Smith’s military son-in-law vs. a squad of cartel-killers (it’s staged to work like a Martial Arts set piece), and welcome giggles from Lawrence’s delusions of grandeur. With costs & grosses comparable to the last BB pic (both directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah), Smith aces a neat soft landing.
SCREWY THOJUGHT OF THE DAY: But what happens should Smith want to play a contemptible villain?
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