Bad Boys 1995 is a Tarantino picture gone Bayhem!
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Blender Dumbass👁 5
The first thing you notice when watching Michael Bay's directorial debut Bad Boys is that the movie is not trying to be a Michael Bay film. There was no Michael Bay films prior to it. Bay was doing music videos and commercials before this film. And while those do have some of the style Bay will eventually bring over to his cinema pictures, here it seems he is actually trying something else entirely. The best analogy for the movie would be Tony Scott's 1993 film True Romance written by Quentin Tarantino.
The first scene of the movie sets up the characters of Mike Lowrey ( Will Smith ) and Marcus Burnett ( Martin Lawrence ), with a conversation that goes wrong and then goes stupidly wrong. The inspiration from the Tarantino dialogue is stupidly apparent. Pulp Fiction was released in May of 1994, while the Principal Photography for Bad Boys started in June ( a month later ), while the Tarantino picture was still probably in the cinemas.
There is a lot of stories from set about how much Michael Bay hated the dialogue in the script. And how much he wanted to elevate it to something much greater. And thus most of the dialogue you hear in the film they came with on set during filming. Or even totally improvised. So it's safe to assume that a huge influence of Tarantino seeped into the dialogue of this movie as a result. There is even a "Big Kahuna" reference at one point.
Compared to Bad Boys 2 this movie is surprisingly tame. While the second movie goes full Bayhem!, this movie is not. Probably because there was no budget here. There is Michael Bay stuff in it. There are explosions. There are things falling from cars during a car chase. And there are techniques that Bay will refine later. Like the spinning camera shot he is famous for, or the way he shoots closeups of people during a high intensity car chase. But most of the movie feels like it's not even Michael Bay. But like it is Tony Scott or something. The intense filter in the opening sequence is reminiscent of the intense filter Scott used for the opening of Top Gun. And later a lot of the tone and techniques feel like imitations of Scott.
Therefor if Bay was going for something like Tony Scott stylistically, while for something like Tarantino with the dialogue, this movie is kind of like True Romance, where Scott actually directed Tarantino's dialogue.
Yet towards the end the movie shifts a little. By the end of the film, Bay is awaken and unleashed. It is not the modern Bay yet. It is not Bay who knows how to Bayhem! properly. It is a raw baby Bay boy who will eventually grow into the Bay we know now. But it is unmistakably Bay.
I think that Téa Leoni's casting was a bit weird. She really looks fucking cool in the trio of the motherfuckers in the end of the film. And she is properly hot for being a girl in a Michael Bay movie. But something about her voice specifically makes me think that she doesn't really fit the material. When watching the movie in a Russian dub ( long time ago ) I don't remember having this issue. But watching it with the original sound something about her strikes me as strange.
That said, she does have some bad ass moments in the film. The shot of her entering the night club to kill the bastard that killed her friend is fucking epic. And while Bay turns her character into a soft-core non-nude pornography, she is kind of cool actually. Maybe the voice helps with it in a strange way. She doesn't sound like she is trying to seduce the audience, and therefor it balances out the pornography. Which gives her character more character, so to speak.
Happy Hacking!!!
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