No, it’s not the fourth instalment though you might expect some wordplay from the title but Bad Boys For Life brings back the franchise after 17 years for a third one. They take their time to insist that it’s for one last time but also insist to erase that later on. Well that’s for another time to talk about perhaps. This new film certainly loves all the crazy Florida stuff from before but the new directorial duo Adil & Bilall (Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah) manage to clean up a little bit of the Michael Bay dust to freshen up things enough.
At times the movie certainly takes itself a bit too serious but luckily there’s still enough humour packed in to make it a genuinely fun experience. The jokes are about the past two films, what’s happening in the present and also about things that happened during the time between. This leads to the humour being a wide variety, something many franchises lack at this point. Much of the fun is thanks to the undeniable chemistry between Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. Lawrence absolutely owns this movie as he nails every single one of his jokes and also most of the emotional moments as well. Smith on the other hand finally gets let loose after just doing the ''willsmithness'' in all his recent stuff, like the awfully boring ‘Gemini Man’. It’s been a while since he’s had this much charm.
Two hours of ”badboying” is a bit too much for the story in hand, especially since there are drone shots for three other movies as well included here. Some fatigue starts to get felt during some action scenes before the last one and it doesn’t help that there’s an unnecessary, MCU-like tease for more in the end that feels completely undeserved after observing the mayhem caused. During those action scenes the age of the older cast and inexperience of youngsters is clear, that might also be down to practice time or wanting to cut them in the vein of Bay. Thankfully they are shot so much better this time around while also using some interesting colour palettes.
Smileys: Martin Lawrence, humour, Will Smith
Frowneys: Runtime, stunt choreography
The best looking Bad Boys so far, the new team injected some much needed energy.
