44 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
44 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
capsule : annoyingly unentertaining , obvious and paper-thin buddy/cop/drug/sexy-witness movie .
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presence of director michael bay shows none of the talent he demonstrated in the rock .
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i've seen this movie already , i said , as i looked at the box art .
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no , i haven't even seen a trailer for the movie ; i don't even know what it's about , but i can look at the way they're promoting it , and i know i've seen it already .
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i thought : it's about these two cops .
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and they're buddies , sort of .
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they're at each other's throats a lot , but they really do like each other .
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and everyone else in their department hates them 'cause they're hot-shots .
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and they have some kind of diametric opposition in their relationship .
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and one day they're in the middle of cop business as usual when they get mixed up in this plot that involves a really sadistic bad guy with lots of henchmen who can never hit anything with the billions of rounds of ammo they are always carrying .
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and the bad guy is a drug lord .
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and there's a witness , and she's this sexy thing who rubs both of them the wrong way .
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and their supervisor wants their badges for breakfast when they blow up half the town bringing this guy down .
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i only missed the bit about the badges .
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the rest i got dead-on .
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and i hadn't even left the video store yet .
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the cops in this movie are will smith and martin lawrence , and the bad guy is the immensely underutilized tcheky karyo .
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smith plays a cop who has a trust fund and is thus not a cop for the money ; martin l . is a family man ( shades of the now-tired lethal weapon dynamic here ) whose wife and he are at total odds .
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this leads to some strained scenes about lawrence's " not getting any " , and some totally unneccesary bits with him skulking around his own house , thinking his partner is now his wife's " back door man " .
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not funny ; tiresome .
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bad boys gets some of its incredibly meager selling points from the presence of will smith and martin lawrence .
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will smith is a natural , and i'm happy to see him in movies like six degrees . . .
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and men in black .
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he's funny and charming without trying to be ; he really does seem to be enjoying himself .
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martin lawrence is a different story ; he's so uptight and verbally constipated that sitting through his improvised riffs are a trial .
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movies like this are not about originality .
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i know this .
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they are about style and energy and synergy between actors .
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i know this , too .
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and yet , while watching bad boys , which its glamorous photography and impossibly exact stunt choreography , i felt fed up .
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i'd seen con air , which despite being completely implausible , was still great fun , because it tried however feebly to put some new life into the mix .
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bad boys is a dry run -- and overlong , too , clocking in at just over two hours with a lot more by-play than i felt could be justified .
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i could write this movie .
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you could write this movie .
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many people have .
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many people will continue to write this movie , over and over again .
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other people will buy it from them , and make it , and we will pay money to see it .
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more the fools we all .
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in a terrifyingly prescient line from his book a scanner darkly , phil k . dick once mused that the mcdonaldburger ( as he called it ) would eventually eclipse money as the token of cultural and financial exchange .
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one day we will all just sit in our living rooms and sell the same burger back and forth to each other .
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the same could be said about this movie .
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i have the sinking feeling we're going to see it again .
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soon .
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