Is 'Bad Boys for Life' wearing some fame face?

No Content for Old Men

with Matt Craig

In this week's newsletter: A review of Bad Boys for Life, and two HBO half-hour comedies that came out this week. Then a stroll down memory lane in the action comedy genre, plus a few streaming recs. Lastly in this week's "Trailer Watch," I can't help but give it up for Christopher Nolan.

Word Count: 844 words
Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

Bad Boys for Life

The Disease of Meta

On one of the funniest and most insightful episodes of the aggressively facetious Netflix show "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," Jamie Foxx tells Jerry Seinfeld a story about his early stand-up comedy career. "I had made a little money and I went on stage doing rich jokes," he says, "and people were looking at me like what the ****." He'd lost his hunger, he explains, and carried that comfort in the form of a few dozen excess pounds. As he puts it, "I had a little fame face."

Fame face. It's impossible to watch the new Bad Boys reboot and not think about the concept, as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence return to their star-making characters a good 25 years and many millions of dollars after they first burst on the scene as a pair of boisterous Miami police detectives.

These days, Lawrence is mostly retired and Smith is mostly an Instagram dad. Age and success has seen their faces widen and fill accordingly. So it was fair to ask whether the action comedy A-listers had lost their eye of the tiger (to reference to another on-screen star whose success went to his head).

The question is so present, in fact, that it actually becomes the backbone of this entire movie. We're the old guys now!, the movie screams, complete with a crew of younger actors meant to embody the hipster youth culture that's passing them by.

Keep in mind we live in a post-Deadpool world, where a movie's meta commentary is as important and necessary as the explicit material on screen. A fictional movie universe and "real life" (or at least the carefully curated public lives) of movie stars can no longer be separated, so everything in the movie is inherently a comment on the stars themselves. (Case and point, a literal High School Musical joke is made at the expense of Vanessa Hudgens, that movie's star.)

Which is funny, because you'd be hard pressed to find two movies less self-aware than the first two entries into this series, released in the '90s and early '00s, back when trying hard to be cool was cool. My how things have changed! In 2020 "cool" is out and ironic detachment is in, or at least intricately fabricated self-deprecation that can pass as #relatable.

So now both characters are over the hill, if not entirely washed, and their dynamic hinges on how much they're willing to accept that fact. Smith rages against it while Lawrence embraces it. If Bad Boys for Life is an action comedy, than Smith basically plays Detective Action and Lawrence is his partner, Detective Comedy.

The dynamic works because it's so aware of exactly what it is. For the first time, our heroes seem to realize how ridiculous it is that we've now squeezed three movies (and counting!) out of the chorus of a single reggae song. I lost count on the number of times that song is played, or sung by one of the characters. It's outnumbered by the amount of times someone drops the phrase "bad boys" or "bad boys for life." I almost expected, after the Boys say, "One last time?" ... "One last time" then fist bump on a hotel rooftop at sunset, that we were going to get a fourth wall-breaking wink and nod to the camera.

To be clear, this movie is very dumb. But it's dumb fun in exactly the same way Fast & Furious is dumb fun. The action and stakes have risen astronomically, to such a degree that it begs not to be taken seriously. The first movie was a small Miami story about someone stealing a little heroin from the police lock up, and now we're on a globe-trotting adventure fighting a superhuman assassin.

We must acknowledge the third person at the core of the Bad Boys universe: Michael Bay. He directed the first two movies, with his signature maximalist style. And though he didn't helm this reboot, the relatively unknown directing team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah have done a pretty convincing Bay imitation here. (Bay himself makes a cameo, complete with the slow motion, 360-degree, low angle close-up he made famous.) Basically, you can expect a lot of explosions and stylized backgrounds and overly dramatic camera work. Because apparently, everything I said about meta text earlier does not yet apply to action movie directors.

So the answer to my question is a qualified no. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence still got it. They aren't the bad ass action stars of old, but their newer, plumper, more cuddly versions of themselves are still a great hang.

With all that being said, probably the most 2020 thing about Bad Boys for Life is its ending. Which I won't spoil, but let's just say it's not very subtle about its intention to launch one (and if Sony can help it, many more) sequel featuring our favorite Bad Boys.

If only I had a nickel for every time there was a "time" after "one last time."

Streaming Suggestions!

Something New

Curb Your Enthusiasm S10 (HBO): Larry David is back, again. Season 10, year 20. And wouldn't ya know it, the 72-year-old has found some more things that irritate him. The first episode rolls back the same formula and the same supporting characters that have made Curb one of the funniest shows of all time, and somehow the foundation still holds. If you know, you know.

Avenue 5 (HBO): Armando Iannuci set the expectations sky high with this HBO comedy, considering the last show he launched was Veep. His reputation helped land a fantastic comedic cast, including Hugh Laurie and Josh Gad, Zach Woods (Jared from "Silicon Valley") and Andy Buckley (David Wallace from "The Office" !!). And it's a pretty great premise: a luxury cruise ship through outer space goes off course, and everyone is stuck together as they work through their frustrations (and incompetencies). Despite all that...the pilot episode was an absolute mess. The seams showed on some ill-conceived plotting and the jokes did not land. Still, this cast and crew has earned the trust of a few more episodes.

What Did Jack Do? (Netflix): Want evidence that Netflix is playing with funny money? The streaming giant funded this black and white short film starring legendary filmmaker David Lynch as a detective, interrogating a monkey about a murder, taking place in a single room with two cameras. What a world we live in. This thing makes no logical sense, which makes it funny in its own way. I guess Netflix will do anything to get into the good graces of great directors, whether it be nonsense projects like this or spending some $200 million on a nearly four-hour CGI de-aged faux Oscar contender (wonder who that could be). More power to 'em!

Something Old

Beverly Hills Cop II (asdf): This week for reference I fired up the predecessor to Bad Boys, starring Eddie Murphy.

Bad Boys (1995, Netflix): Sheesh, it's really been 25 years since Will Smith and Martin Lawrence first teamed up? That seems hard to believe, until you flip this bad boy (pun intended) on Netflix and find the most stereotypical '90s action movie ever. It's super fun, super over-the-top, and lacking all self-awareness. But Smith and Lawrence are electric, and I appreciate how grounded this series started.

Something to Stream

Bad Boys II (Netflix): Eight years later they came back for the paycheck, and somehow made the best entry in the series, fine-tuned for MAXIMUM Michael Bay-ness. It's all dude sweat, friendly ribbing, hero shots and big explosions. Military worship, homophobia, female objectification, and hating math. Pure ridiculousness. It's all the things that we've spent the last 15 years making fun of, but back in 2003, we thought was the coolest thing in the world.

Midsommar (Amazon): This summer it felt like Ari Aster's follow-up horror project earned a few weeks of attention. Then it went away, ignored by the historically genre-hating awards voting bodies. Florence Pugh's lead performance is a powerhouse, and Aster is proving to be a master craftsman. It's not so much "scary" in a traditional sense, more disturbing, but it's definitely worth the watch now that it's available to stream.

About Time (Netflix): It's a romantic comedy that turns into a family drama, with a misbegotten premise and some problematic continuity elements, but it's so sweet and heart-warming nothing else really matters. Listen, I'm merely a human being. We could all use a smile!

Trailer Watch: TeneT

By now you should all know that I am not the biggest Christopher Nolan fan. But I have to admit I'm legitimately impressed by how he's managed to brand himself. He gets big budgets and big movie stars for these epic and original stories, and somehow still places himself at the center of the conversation. TeneT is not a John David Washington movie, or a Robert Pattinson movie, it's a Christopher Nolan movie. And that's enough to make his movies box office smash hits. With no Avengers and no Star Wars this year, this movie about some kind of time-travelling detective (I guess?) might honestly be the most anticipated movie of the entire 2020. Woah.