Bad Boys II

Michael Bay’s 2003 film sets Mike and Marcus against each other once they learn Marcus’s sister Syd is undercover inside the same ecstasy pipeline they are chasing into Miami. Shooting ran from July to December 2002, mostly in Miami. For the car-transporter chase the MacArthur Causeway’s eastbound lanes were closed in early August 2002, and one side of Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park served this film while 2 Fast 2 Furious shot the other. Its hardness became the main argument about it. The American R rating cited “strong violence and action, pervasive language, sexuality and drug content,” and the BBFC advice reads “strong language, bloody violence and horror.” Morgues, corpses and dismembered bodies are played straight for laughs. Roger Ebert built his objection around a scene involving a teenage boy; Richard Roeper named it the worst film of 2003. A 130 million dollar budget returned 273 million worldwide. The series did not stop here: Bad Boys for Life came in 2020, Bad Boys: Ride or Die in 2024, and Gabrielle Union’s Syd got her own two-season series, L.A.’s Finest, in 2019 and 2020. A good fit if one chase staged by shutting a city causeway is worth the ticket. Not for you if a morgue and a dismembered body used as punchlines read as anything but comedy.