THIS?! This was the breakout film role for one of the biggest stars in the film industry? How did ANYone involved with this get another job? THIS was directed by the guy who would next direct "The Rock"? I have seen and enjoyed every movie Michael Bay has directed (as well as the music videos of a couple of singles from "Bat Out of Hell 2" ), except for the two 'Bad Boys', and now I'm having cognitive dissonance.

EVERYONE in this movie is stupid and just yells incoherently at each other instead of communicating any of the information which should be their priority to express in a given scene. No one has any business complaining about the verisimultude of "Armageddon", and astrophysicists are a tiny slice of society, next to the depiction of police work (or human dialogue). Also, I got the impression that this was supposed to be some sort of action-fest. It's not. The plot of "Bad Boys" is too hacky for an average sitcom, and too ridiculously executed.

The swinging single, rich kid cop, Mike, has a CI, who gets murdered and the CI's roommate was told she could only trust Mike, but Mike's not around when she calls the cops to tell them she saw the murder, so his partner, Marcus, a married father of three, has to pretend to be Mike, and stash the witness, Julie, at Mike's luxury apartment, to keep her protected. And because he left the police station to pick her up in his personal family car, and the bad guys saw the plate, his family is in danger, so Mike has to stay with them to protect them. Aside from such an inherently humorous</sarcasm> premise, we are supposed to be amused by the utterly incompetent lies of Mike and Marcus to explain things to Julie and Marcus' wife, while pretending to be each other for Julie. Because the person being hunted by violent murderous thugs is calling the shots with the police. And the entire police force consists of four detectives and a captain with the absolute power to order them to play along with the farce at the risk of their jobs.

There's Tcheky Karyo as the mastermind of a gang that steals drugs from police evidence, so the CSI lady playing an internal affairs investigator can yell at the captain, and he makes Bond villains look like HR geniuses, with his randomly murdering people because science doesn't science the way he wants, but not killing Julie once he finally catches her, so the plot can happen.

And the action is positively awful. Guys jump at moving cars and somehow catch up to them despite one angle clearly showing there is no way they should, unless they can change direction and the angle of their arc in mid-air. Bad guys point a gun and start to pull a trigger and the good guys have all day to run up to their victim and yank them to safety. Everyone just flails their arms in the air with their mouths open during the gunfights.

There is nothing fun about this movie. The action is ridiculous and unexciting. The relationships between the characters are undeveloped, and function at random, with them making absurd leaps of logic to radically misjudge each other one moment, and then being supportive or accepting for no reason the next. The dialogue is just people yelling at each other, and there are no jokes. There are things that are supposed to punch lines, but the scripting and delivery is so disjointed the humor is completely leeched out of them. The lies or covers are so stupid, the action is so over-the-top bad, the people so aggravating and annoying, that you can't even "just shut off your brain and enjoy it." The plot is so disjointed, you HAVE to try thinking to figure out what's going on, and absolutely nothing stands up to any scrutiny.

In hindsight, it seems like this movie made a splash, because in 1995, no one bothered with choreography or blocking combat scenes. No one trained actors to hold guns. I think this was supposed to be a mismatched buddies story, just a dumb, unfunny comedy, that Bay got his hands on and used his indisputable talents to fake an action movie, and stun an unsophisticated and undiscerning audience with noise and motion and posturing. His camera work almost makes certain pedestrian scenes look dramatic. Bay is really the hero here, taking a lot of nothing and tricking people into thinking there's anything.

But at least now I know I won't be missing anything by not seeing the threequel coming out this weekend.

Holy shit.