First Impressions: "Bad Boys II" (2003)

   Well, I said before that I wouldn't be reviewing Armageddon and Pearl Harbor simply because I'd already seen them. But, for the sake of completion on this Michael Bay marathon, I might as well briefly go over them.
   Armageddon never changes its tone: the whole thing is just nonstop noise and chaos. So I found it got progressively worse and worse.
   And Pearl Harbor fails as a love story because the characters are all flat as pancakes, which makes the fact that their story takes up almost the entire three-hour run time even more unbearable. You may or may not like Titanic, which Pearl Harbor was so obviously trying to copy (I love it, for the record), but at least it had more to its characters than this!
   Now, on to Bad Boys II…

   Dear God, this movie sucks! The first Bad Boys had me tearing at my hair every five minutes, but this one fails in an entirely different way.
   The plot is that Mike and Marcus have joined the PD's drugs department since movie one, and are investigating an ecstasy shipment.
   I've made it abundantly clear that I can't stand Michael Bay's hyper, jumbled direction and editing. Well, here, it's worse than ever before! The action scenes couldn't possibly be less exciting, because half the time you can't even tell where people are in proximity to each other. The lead-in to several of those sequences certainly doesn't help! It's all down to poorly established dialogue that I don't understand or care about.
   All the characters returning from the first movie are just as annoying as before. Right from Will Smith and Martin Lawrence's first appearance, I knew I was going to detest them all over again.
   The humour is still painfully unfunny. In particular, every joke in both these movies that focuses on corpses is just straight-up tasteless.
   There are a couple of good ideas here and there, like the boat on the road, but it just made me wish they were in a better movie.
   In conclusion, while it's not as annoying as the first Bad Boys, it is the most insufferably boring Michael Bay movie up until Transformers 2. This movie is two-and-a-half hours long, and believe me, I felt every minute of it!
   My rating: turkey.