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Bad Boys came out in 1995 and marked the ascendance of two television stars: Will Smith (whose next film, released just weeks after the series ender of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, would be Independence Day), and Martin Lawrence (who still had two more seasons of Martin left, but would turn to directing for the first and only time with his next film, A Thin Line Between Love and Hate). Bad Boys opened at #1 with $15 million on its way to $65 million total and slightly more than that worldwide, on a $19 million budget. I re-watched it along with Bad Boys II and cared even less about it now then I did then (at least Bad Boys II gets me worked up) but there is one truth that I recognized then that still holds up today: Tea Leoni can be a formidable comic talent given the right role, but watching her play the archetypal, short-skirted, dead-behind-the-eyes Bay heroine with the camera leering over her ass and tits is painful. She is as sorely and absurdly miscast - and appears as uncomfortable - as Ellen DeGeneres playing the heterosexual romantic lead in that dreadful 1996 comedy with Bill Pullman. (No, I am not going to summon its name.)

Bad Boys wasn’t a film that ever cried out for a second installment, but from the “obligation to make money” standpoint, it would have been understandable if a sequel had come out within a year or two reuniting everyone for more of the same with a slightly bigger budget. By that time, however, Smith and Bay had blown up big time, Simpson had passed on, and the end result was an eight-year slog towards a prime summer opening in July 2003 with a budget almost seven times larger than the first film, a running time a half hour longer (up from 119 minutes to a grueling 146 minutes), and a plot whose tone veers wildly between third-rate standup humor & horrific grindhouse violence, and doesn’t just border on parody but occupies it, with hostile intent.

For one of the world’s biggest (and most likable) stars coming off his first Oscar nomination, and a director on a commercial hot streak with back to back PG-13 films - Armageddon and Pearl Harbor - grossing at or near $200 million, it seems in retrospect both a curious step backwards and an understandable vertical run to reunite for an event film that seemed determined to blow everything up real good to justify its existence. Even with that hefty price tag, Bad Boys II more than doubled it globally, grossing $138 million domestically and $134 overseas. It’s Lawrence’s second biggest hit (after Wild Hogs) but doesn’t make the top five for Bruckheimer, Bay or Smith. Critically, it’s regarded about as well as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (which is to say not very) and like that movie it features very small creatures involved in attempted intercourse (a dog humping a leg in T: RotF and two rats copulating in Bad Boys II).

The screenplay is a peculiar mash up of “visions” with frequent Bruckheimer collaborators Cormac & Marianne Wibberly - writers of the family-friendly National Treasure series and G-Force - getting co-story credit along with Ron Shelton, best known for sports films including Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, and Tin Cup. Shelton then gets screenplay credit, as does Jerry Stahl, a television writer (ALF in the ‘80s, CSI in the last decade) who is still best known by me for being portrayed by Ben Stiller in the adaptation of Stahl’s memoir Permanent Midnight. Now, Shelton has also directed and/or written some cop-related films such as Dark Blue and Hollywood Homicide, but I would be hard-pressed among that trio of scribes to determine who was responsible for the film’s exceedingly raunchy tone, cavalierly nonchalant misogyny, and horrific violence as a punchline.

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