Obnoxious directing compensating for a lame writing
It’s been a long time since I’ve been this distracted by directing/cinematography this try-hard and obnoxious. Every single frame of this movie reeks of desperation and insecurity in the written material. If you thought “The Gray Man” had the most distracting use of drone shots ever, be prepared for it to be blown out of the water by Bad Boys 4. Every shot was a new attempt at a different camera style or tracking shot. It was like watching a 2 hour music video. Good directors know when to let a scene breathe. We’re not dealing with good directors here. Competent? Absolutely. Good? Nope.
All the performances are pretty bad except for Martin Lawrence, whose character is now relegated to just straight up being a clown, accentuated constantly by the directors’ aggressively unpleasant use of extreme close ups. The dramatic bonding moments before the climactic action scene was shot like a comedy scene. But it was meant to be heartwarming. That being said, he plays a good clown, and Lawrence is the only actor who seems to actually be able to let go of his ego.
Will Smith isn’t at all believable in this role anymore, he just isn’t a good enough actor to convince you he’s anything but a pampered movie star. It’s funny how the writers have to make so many caveats and leaps to allow Joey Pants back into the franchise after his character’s death in the last movie. The chief in the first movies was just a regular guy who was friends with the leads, but this movie retcons him to be this unflappable moral hero who is treated with so much reverence, Will Smith just HAS to have this large picture of a dead man at his wedding. Apparently Joey wasn’t just some likeable schmuck, but he was actually an unrelenting super cop, that everyone saw as a messianic figure, who was killed because of his genius skills uncovering drug organisations. The Joey Pants from the first movies was the kind of guy who would throw his computer in a rage because he forgot how to log in, now he’s a genius who knows how to send complex encrypted messages?
There are about a dozen moments of unrelenting cringe throughout. There are moments the filmmakers are thinking are either funny or dramatic but they just come off as phoney and pandering. All the “bad ass” moments are just embarrassing.
The whole plot and resolution is a foregone conclusion, you know exactly who the bad guy is gonna be revealed to be, and how the plot will resolve, within the first 20 minutes. They don’t even have the guts to kill off useless side characters whose death could at least add a sense of consequence to the weightless action scenes.
In a staggering surprise, the musical score and needles drops were actually pretty good and often restrained. Most modern action flicks have dreadful and annoying music choices, but in this, it was the least egregious aspect of a pretty bad 2 hours.
The best part of this movie is the part where the villain is asked “when did all this corruption start?”, and I swear to god his answer starts with “well, after 9/11…”. They did an arrested development joke but totally sincerely. That’s the most unaware thing I’ve seen a film do in years. Classic 10/10 moment, no notes.
One scene indicative of the lazy writing is when Vanessa Hudgens looks at an art piece, sees a QR code and says “that’s strange” and lo and behold, the QR code is crucial to the plot and leads the to another message from the omniscient dead Captain . But QR codes are crazy-common in art exhibits, posters and adverts, just by some miracle she assumed the QR code had to do with the case? This is equivalent to a detective movie, where the lead cop sees a chewing gum wrapper on the street, says “boy that’s strange”, proceeds to pick it up, and sees it has crucial details of the murder suspect written on it. That’s how contrived this writing is. Oh, and the first 10 minutes is just non-stop of the worst exposition dialogue you’ve heard in the last decade.
The forced ambiguous dialogue leading up to this point is excruciating too . Also, why is this huge art night club gig happening in the middle of the day? It’s also funny that there are a tonne of returning characters from the previous film that no one cares about, but the directors think you do. I saw this movie with someone who loves the Bad Boys movies, and he didn’t know who most of the returning characters were.
The worst parts of this movie are when it tried to be heartfelt and dramatic. I felt sick and angry that these filmmakers were trying to manipulate my emotions with the subtlety and nuance of a bad 13 Reasons Why episode.
Marcus FaceTimes with his wife in this movie, and it’s a huge pet peeve of mine when a simple image of someone over FaceTime looks like it was shot with an 8k, million dollar camera. Just use the real phone to make the call! It’ll take way less time and look so much better, and it won’t take us out of the movie! Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Kimi’ did this. Why spend more many to make your movie worse? But I guess that these directors in a nutshell.
Theres also a subplot where Marcus is enlightened after a near death experience, but it changes from scene to scene. Sometimes he won’t care about anything, and the next, he’s right back to his neurotic self, and he just swings back and forth. Also, amazing that in 2024, there’s still a movie so dumb that someone having a panic attack is fixed by someone slapping you and telling you to man up. Legendary stuff right there.
So yeh, not a great movie, occasionally fun and wild, but mostly overlong and annoying. Martin Lawrence and the music was good, the direction could have been good if they had any restraint, and Will Smith and the plot are total flat lines. Oh yeh, and the product placement is crazy. Little hint, if the movie has a bunch of Skittle product placement (ala Shazam 2), then it’s probably a bad film.
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