Film Review - Bad Boys

The two titular Bad Boys are detectives who go about things their own way. They’re bold and brash and high profile, but they get the job done.

The first is a cat box – one of those transparent plastic boxes with a door at either end in which you take your cat to the vets. The second is a milk crate. Milk crates aren’t all that common these days, but the version starring in Bad Boys is a fairly robust blue affair. It’s rarely seen containing pints of milk, but it’s still heavy enough to trip a fleeing criminal which is essentially the Bad Boys crime-fighting tactic.

Great things come in threes and there are three crimes in this film and each crime in the film is divided into three scenes: Planning, waiting and tripping people up. The film could realistically stand as three half-hour episodes of a TV series, but that isn’t meant as a criticism, merely an observation. There’s a formula at work here. We see the cat box and the milk crate resting in front of a blackboard for ten minutes – this is the planning section. Then there is a long, slow-panning shot of our two heroes lying in wait in a corridor or on some stairs – this is the waiting section. Finally, we see a criminal fleeing the scene of a crime and eventually coming a cropper on either of the two lead characters – this is the tripping people up section. This formula replays three times in different locations and then it’s the end.