Bad Boys I & II

Miami cop Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) is speaking to his DEA-agent sister Sydney (Gabrielle Union,) with fellow cop Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) by his side. The movie is "Bad Boys II," and the trio is working to bring down ecstasy kingpin Johnny Tapia. But they have different methods for executing that takedown -- the two cops are uninteresting in doing full turns around the corners. "You got a warrant for that wire?" Sydney asks them, about some eavesdropping devices they've recently planted near Tapia. Marcus' response is succinct, and yet it encapsulates the entire attitude of the "Bad Boys" series: "Look," he says, "fuck that."

We do have to wait for the second film for the pair to get so brazenly boisterous. The first "Bad Boys" is a relatively smaller affair -- it remains in Miami, and less government agents get involved. Then again, you can only call this movie "small" when you measure by the standards of the franchise's director, Michael Bay ("Transformers," "Armageddon"). "Bad Boys" was his very first film, but his artistic stamp had already been forged: the fetishization of military hardware, the copious explosions, the unabashedly straight-male gaze of the camera, the unwavering commitment to bad taste -- it's all present and accounted for. Marcus and Mike are working with Julie Mott (T�a Leoni) to take down the heroin kingpin Fouchet (Tch�ky Karyo.) But given Bay's predilection for overstimulation of the senses, what matters more than the narrative are the textures themselves: the red-hot color palette, the constant use of muzzle-flashes and fire-power -- it's like watching embers burn off the side of the screen.

The recently-released Blu-ray box set of the two films allows for a renewed appreciation of those highly-disreputable textures. Both films have been remastered, providing for a filmic clarity unseen in prior home video releases of each-look for the shading that's visible through dark shadows, and the unsteady flares of light that often obscure the edges of the frame. This is actually the very first high-definition home video release for "Bad Boys II," and the film truly benefits from the brightening-up: this may be Bay's most bombastic effort -- a carnival of swirling camerawork and shifting color palettes.

"Bad Boys II" starts off when Bay places his "directed by" credit under the image of a burning cross. That's a gauntlet of bad taste getting thrown down. The next scene stages a John Woo-adjacent gunfight between our two African-American hero-cops and the white supremacists gathered under that burning object. There's a plotline in the scenes that followed-the aforementioned triangle between Miami P.D., the DEA, and Mr. Tapia-but Bay is more interested in chasing adrenaline rushes. Ecstasy is dropped, informants are interrogated, cadavers are used for drug trafficking, and then are used again as weapons... the cumulative effect is something like lowbrow decadence. And the aesthetics match that: the speed-ramping, the overexposures, the under exposures, the motion-blurring, the whip-panning, the crash-zooming... the only time Bay slows down is when he turns the film towards slow-motion.

Each of the two discs in the package include a number of special features. For starters, both movies are accompanied by a number of music videos for tracks featured on the soundtrack, as well as trailers and TV spots. The first "Bad Boys" also features a commentary with Michael Bay (who goes into meticulous detail discussing many of the special effects accomplished using practical methods), as well as a documentary that considers much of the same territory ("Putting the Boom and Bang in the Bad Boys").

The "Bad Boys II" Blu-ray has a similar focus: explosions. The extra features include extended "sequence breakdowns" that detail the making-of for five of the different action scenes. There's also a ten-minute documentary on the film's stuntmen, a twenty-minute piece on the digital visual effects team, a number of short deleted sequences, and over an hour's worth of "production diary" footage. Those pieces feature fly-on-the-wall and interview-based footage of individual days of shooting, detailing-yet again-exactly how Mr. Bay goes about orchestrating his implosions and explosions. For fans of the film, this offers a weird perspective: half the fun of "Bad Boys II" is watching all the effects blur by your eye. The extra features on these discs are designed to help you see them soberly.

"Bad Boys I and II"
Blu-ray (2 Discs)
$26.99
Sonypictures.com