Starring: Will Smith (I), Martin Lawrence (I), Gabrielle Union

4 out of 10 stars

For those who prefer their summer movie thrills unsullied by the stylistic touches of cyborgs, pirates, hulks, angels, zombies or even Mark Wahlberg, Bad Boys II offers undiluted chases, crashes, explosions, shootings and killings all in the service of their own sound and fury. No nuance needed here, just the pleasure of destroying things with an almost Zen-like purpose – it's the sound of one budget exploding. One gets the distinct feeling that everything constructed for Bad Boys II – from the family pool in the backyard to the Cuban beachside mansion – was created for one reason only: to demolish it in the most feckless, chaotic way possible. If you ever wanted to see tens of millions of dollars destroyed, this is one of the few movies that would satisfy your craving.

Is there anything wrong with that? Not at all. If there were, the action movie genre would be extinct and both producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay would be looking for gainful employment on Monster.com. But despite having money to burn and burning it non-stop, Bad Boys II is one movie desperately in need of a spark. In the 1995 original, that jolt of adrenaline was the byplay of stars Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, both still relative neophytes in the Hollywood game. Starring in a buddy pic for then first-time director Bay, they riffed and came up with an improv chemistry that sparked an otherwise nondescript script. And Bay's directorial career literally exploded on the screen as he became the Bruckheimer-ic heir apparent to Tony Scott – on purpose, it seems. (To paraphrase Woody Harrelson in the Scott-like Indecent Proposal, "Even a brick wants to be something.") Three stars colliding caused quite the minor supernova, and careers were built and millions made. In a way, it's amazing the stars and director didn't reunite sooner.

Of course, it took however many years and the work of six (credited) writers to come up with a screenplay that, if possible, wore down the threadbare plot of the first even further. In the original Bad Boys, Smith and Lawrence had to assume one another's identities while harboring a witness (Tea Leoni – ah yes, remember her?), so you had family man Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) trying to be playboy Mike Lowrey (Smith), while the ladies' man was doing the wife-and-kids thing – wacky, no? Well, there ain't no wackiness here, as the two partners now are hot on the trail of a Cuban drug lord (Jordi Molla) who's hell bent on making Miami his drug monopoly via Ziploc bags full of Ecstasy. The sole dramatic tension of the film – aside from, you know, killing the bad guys -- relies on Marcus' desire to find another, less stressful partner and Mike not wanting to freak out Marcus by telling him he's dating Marcus' DEA agent sister, Syd (Gabrielle Union). So they fight, they shoot, they chase, they crash, they fight, they chase – imagine The Simpsons' Itchy and Scratchy as less hostile, more hip combatants who've joined the police force and you get the picture.

And this goes on for two and a half hours. At an hour and a half, it would be breezy fun. At two hours, perhaps a rousing thrill ride. But two and half hours? In the name of Don Simpson, is that really necessary? And sadly, Bay blows his action wad early in the film with a highway chase that could be subtitled "Bad Boys II – The Video Game" as Smith maneuvers his Porsche through traffic in pursuit of the bad guys who are almost literally throwing cars at them. (They hijacked a tractor trailer full of `em, you see.) While the sequence is quite stunning at times, and obviously saved by some savvy editing, it's still about two degrees away from total incoherence – an observation that could also be applied to the plot. Granted, you don't go to a movie like this for fierce storytelling, but the motives and actions of Molla's eeeeeevil drug lord are about as understandable as his line delivery, which given its guttural resonance and unintended comedy, sounds like Bay instructed him to imitate Homer Simpson imitating Al Pacino as Scarface – while drunk.

Normally, I would have been hoping at this point to write that the saving grace of the film lies in Smith and Lawrence's wit and charisma and recklessly hilarious interplay. However, barring the possibility that some writer got paid for inserting the word "motherfucker" liberally into the screenplay, the improv element of the script appears to be almost entirely gone – which ain't saying a lot for the comic stylings of DJ Marty Mart and the Fresh Prince. Aside from a couple semi-inspired moments -- when the two conspire to scare the crap out of the stone-faced teenage boy who's come to take Marcus' daughter on a date, and the aftereffects of Marcus' accidental ingestion of Ecstasy – Smith and Lawrence seem to be playing this one totally by the book. In Lawrence's book, apparently the sentence "Act manic, hostile, whiny and irritating" appears on page after page; Smith's volume must consist of a singular theme: "I'm Will Smith – and damn if I ain't cool!" As for the rest of the cast, the coolly sexy Union holds her own with the two stars (though she doesn't have really anything to do), and returning Bad Boys guy Joe Pantoliano, as the frustrated boss man, steals his few scenes effortlessly. It's one of the few effortless things in the movie – even the ocean waves seem forced.

Despite the rote work from Lawrence and Smith, ultimately the man who comes out the worst in Bad Boys II is Michael Bay (who, in a fit of either hubris or humility, gives himself a cameo as the driver of a rust-bucket jalopy). Never an extremely skilled filmmaker, and one who relies on one too many be-the-bullet point-of-view shots, Bay at least has (or rather, had) a knack for keeping a movie going… at least until those movies got longer and longer and longer. Even then, he knew when to deliver the big bang that audiences had been waiting for, be it in Armageddon or even Pearl Harbor, which managed to whip up a rousing action sequence -- after the Japanese bombed the harbor, no less. Here, there's no big bang, and the final half hour – a quasi-military rescue operation into Cuba that could be called Bad Boys Black Hawk Down – is one monster of a letdown in terms of action and mayhem; a regular episode of Miami Vice had just as much style and excitement, if not more. The sheer flaccidness of Bad Boys II is enough to make one long for the maturity and gravitas of a film like… Pearl Harbor.

Damn, I can't believe I just said that.