The Screen Scribe

There are action films that try to be gritty and profound, and then there’s Bad Boys, which simply wants to blow up half of Miami while Will Smith and Martin Lawrence trade insults like two stand-up comics armed with Glocks. This is Michael Bay before the military fetishism and robot mayhem, a hungry music video director with two sitcom stars, a sweaty Miami aesthetic, and a desire to make the coolest movie of 1995. The result is a film that’s brash, chaotic, deeply 90s, and absolutely unmissable if your idea of cinema involves bullet casings raining down in slow motion while someone screams, “That’s how we do it!”

Released in 1995, Bad Boys is Bay’s directorial debut, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as Miami narcotics detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett. When $100 million of seized heroin is stolen from the precinct’s evidence locker, these two mismatched partners have 72 hours to recover it before Internal Affairs shuts them down. Cue fast cars, slow-motion shootouts, mistaken identity hijinks, and the kind of sweaty, neon-lit Miami cinematography that would make Tony Montana blush.

What makes Bad Boys such an enduring guilty pleasure is its raw, unpolished energy. This is Bay before the budgets got astronomical, before Transformers dominated his career, back when he was just a music video director with a camera, a cocaine-fuelled script, and two sitcom stars eager to prove they could be big-screen heroes. The result? Explosions that feel tactile, gunfights that are loud and chaotic but never incoherent, and an action style dripping with late 20th-century bravado.

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are the film’s nuclear core. Smith oozes effortless cool as millionaire playboy cop Mike Lowrey, while Lawrence grounds the film with anxious family-man relatability as Marcus Burnett. Their chemistry is electric, half comedic bickering, half ride-or-die brotherhood, that very likely owes a lot to the Lethal Weapon franchise.

Of course, the plot is nonsense. Villains are cookie-cutter Eurotrash criminals, character development is paper-thin, and every woman in the film is either a love interest or a hostage. But Bad Boys isn’t here to philosophise. It’s here to blow things up, throw quips like daggers, and watch two charismatic stars out-cool each other for two hours straight.

Visually, this is Bay’s Miami Vice fever dream, shot with swirling camera angles, golden-hour glows, and enough sunset silhouettes to fill three Enrique Iglesias music videos. And let’s not forget Mark Mancina’s bombastic score that is pure 90s action movie adrenaline in audio form. Bad Boys is loud, messy, occasionally problematic, and entirely irresistible. It’s a time capsule of an era when action films were simpler, stars had swagger, and Michael Bay still edited for clarity rather than chaos.

If you want to switch off your brain, kick back with a beer, and watch two legends trade insults and bullets in equal measure, Bad Boys remains one of the most unapologetically entertaining rides of the 90s. Whatcha gonna do? Watch it again, obviously.

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