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Loud, ultra-violent and a good 30 minutes too long, this has its moments but is more likely to give you a headache than anything else.

Bad Boys II is the latest in a long line of sequels that nobody really wanted, though the box office success of the first one pretty much guaranteed its inevitability. It re-teams all the principle players of the first movie: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, director Michael Bay and uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, though sadly Tea Leoni is conspicuous by her absence.

Not Much Of A Plot

There isn’t really much of a plot – it’s basically Will Smith (as Mike) and Martin Lawrence (as Marcus) vs A Bunch Of Vicious Cuban Drug Smugglers – though there are sub-plots involving Mike secretly dating Marcus’ sister (Gabrielle Union), who also happens to be a DEA agent involved in taking down the same guys Mike and Marcus are after.

Essentially, though, the set-up is just an excuse for a constant barrage of explosions, gunfights, car chases and bickering.

The film definitely has its moments – some of the action sequences are pretty impressive (such as a bullet’s-eye view of its trajectory through some glass bottles and Lawrence’s arse before it hits a bad guy) and a lot of the one-liners hit their targets.

An extended gag where Mike and Marcus are unwittingly caught having a heart to heart on a video camera relayed to the store’s TV sets (“My ass still hurts from where you popped me from behind”) is typical of the level of the film’s humour.

Deafening Gunfire And Dismembered Corpses

However, though it’s never exactly boring, the film is far too long and eventually the level of gunfire becomes almost deafening. Similarly, a lot of the film’s sequences leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth – the ‘drugs in corpses’ scene is bad enough, but there’s a really nasty bit where corpses get scattered and splattered on the freeway during a chase scene, plus several ‘victim’s POV’ shots of objects crashing into windscreens and so on.

Smith can do this sort of thing in his sleep of course (his catchphrase of “It’s what I do” seems especially apt) and even the usually unappealing Lawrence is better here than elsewhere. There’s good support too from Joe Pantoliano (as the put-upon police captain), Gabrielle Union (as, essentially, the eye candy) and both Jordi Molla and Peter Stormare as rival drug bosses (sadly Stormare’s final revenge scenes are wasted, where they could have been brilliant).

Essentially, the film is just about watchable (with a good set of ear-plugs) but suffers from too much repetition, some distasteful scenes and an arse-numbing running time. Better to wait for the video, when at least you can turn the sound down.