Just in time for the 20th anniversary of the first movie in the series, Sony presents Bad Boys and Bad Boys II on Blu-ray… together at last!

Bad Boys (1995):

Directed by Michael Bay, Bad Boys tells the story of two cops: family man Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) family man and his swinging single partner, Mike Lowry (Will Smith). These guys work for the Miami Police Department but when a massive stash of cash from a big heroin bust that was taken as evidence goes missing in a scheme masterminded by a man named Fouchet (Tcheky Karyo), they find themselves tasked with getting it back. Their boss, Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) , isn't happy about this.

And so they go about getting the job done. First up, Mike talks to Theresa (Theresa Randle), a prostitute, asking her to keep her eyes open for any big spenders that might come her way. Before you know it, she and her pal Julie (Tea Leoni) have got Theresa's john wanting to spend a lot of cash and do a lot of drugs. Theresa figures this might be the guy, but things go south fast. Theresa winds up brutally murdered and Julie is the only witness to the crime. She goes to the cops and of course Marcus and Mike wind up having to protect her, but to make it work, Marcus has to pretend to be Mike. But time is running out… if they don't get that missing money back, Internal Affairs is going to be pretty upset.

Far more concerned with snappy dialogue, one liners and stuff going KABOOM than with realism or logic, Bad Boys is a big dumb popcorn movie through and through. Smith and Lawrence are the buddy cop version of The Odd Couple, polar opposites in many ways but with enough in common that even when they're not getting along they're getting along. They are well cast here and the movie's script plays to their strengths with Lawrence doing just fine as the fairly subdued married guy and Smith obviously having a lot of fun as the playboy. These guys aren't really stretching as actors here but they handle the action scenes nicely and they have a lot of good back and forth. There's chemistry here. Tea Leoni's character isn't given as much to do but she's fine in the part and she looks great.

At times the whole thing, like a lot of Bay's films, looks, sounds and feels like a music video and it's most definitely an exercise in cinematic style over substance but so too is it fast paced, ridiculously stylish and plenty entertaining. It also easily proved popular enough to spawn a sequel, which brings us to…

Bad Boys II (2003):

…the second movie, once again directed by Michael Bay, who really seemed to be trying to outdo the first one for ridiculous action set pieces. Smith and Laurence reprise their roles as Miami narcs Mike Lowrey and Marcus Bennett but this time around, they're in charge of trying to figure out where a recent influx of dope that's arrived on their turf has come from, and more importantly, how to stop it. They start digging around and all signs point to a kingpin named Hector Juan Carlos 'Johnny' Tapia (Jordi Molla). He's set into motion a plan to take over all of Miami's drug trade and doesn't seem to care if people get killed in the process.

As our two cops wage war against drug dealers, Mike and Marcus' beautiful younger sister Syd (Gabrielle Union), start hitting it off in ways that understandably make Marcus more than a little nervous. Syd, a Fed working undercover, winds up kidnapped by Tapia, and of course Mike and Marcus have to once again put aside their differences and work together to save her.

There's nothing original here, it's a pastiche of other action movies, but hot damn if it isn't fine, if completely brainless, entertainment. It's really more of the same. Stuff blows up all the time, there are plenty of violent shoot outs and good God almighty are there a lot of completely over the top car chases and collisions in this movie, but Bad Boys II is, if a bit long for what it is, a ridiculously fun waste of time. Smith and Laurence have the same chemistry here as they did in the first film made eight years prior and that same completely unrealistic but admittedly very snappy back and forth between them keeps things amusing. Joe Pantoliano is still amusing as the constantly grouchy police captain that our ‘bad boys' report to. Obviously adding the romantic relationship between Mike and Syd allows for even more of that, because there's no way Marcus is going to want his womanizing partner getting involved with his sister.

The comedy is fairly constant here, and so too is the violence. This is a bloody, and at times, pretty nasty action film in that regard, more so than you might expect from a mainstream Hollywood film. And Bay revels in it. The camera lingers on the slow motion bullet holes as often as it does the scantily clad women that are often in frame. Impact wounds explode. Limbers are severed. Corpses litter the screen. The movie certainly plays to our base instincts in this regard. It gives the audience exactly what it wants: blood. But it's escapism. On that level, it's pretty damn effective. You could over think this or argue against it and in a lot of ways it's tough to defend something as dumb, over the top and sleazy as this picture is but then, why bother?

Video:

Both films are presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition taken from 4k scans with the first movie framed at 1.85.1 and the sequel at 2.39.1 and they look excellent. Detail is strong in both features, not just in close up shots where you expect it but in medium and long distance shots as well and both depth and texture are consistently impressive across the board. Color reproduction is pretty much perfect and black levels are nice and deep without crushing things or messing up shadow detail. There are no problems with any compression artifacts or edge enhancement and there's virtually no print damage, but at the same time the transfers look very film-like and features some obvious, but unobtrusive, grain throughout. Bad Boys II does look just a bit more detailed and a bit sharper than the first movie does, which is fair enough as it is a newer picture, but both of these looks excellent here and the transfer for the sequel in particular is reference quality.