CinemaNow - Bad Boys II

Joel Siegel of ABC's Good Morning America is one of several film critics who both loved and hated Bad Boys II. Too loud, too long, too impossible, to violent -- maybe that's why they call it Bad Boys 2, he said on this morning's show. He then added, But there are also two hurt-yourself-funny set pieces ... and this is the first film this summer to pass the Joel Siegel sequel test: If this had been the first one would you want to see a sequel to it? Yeah. Gene Seymour in Newsday writes that the film's stars, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, are as charismatically funny as they were before, but there's a wretched excess of gratuitous property damage. Collin Levey in the Wall Street Journal concludes that the movie misses its target at least as often as it hits it. Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News details some of the racist and homophobic material in the film, then remarks: If Smith and Lawrence weren't such charmingly enthusiastic cutups, this would all be insufferably offensive. It probably is anyway, but they make it get some laughs. The other reviews are mostly all love or all hate. Manohla Dargis in the Los Angeles Times describes it as a mind-boggling, nerve-numbing, adrenaline-pumping combination of shock-and-awe brilliance and idiocy. Lisa Kennedy in the Denver Post calls it this summer's most dynamic action movie. And its funniest. On the other hand, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times damns it as a bloated, unpleasant assembly-line extrusion in which there are a lot of chases and a lot of killings and explosions. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post uses the adjectives vile, noisy, excessive, pandering and seemingly endless to describe it. And Mike Clark in USA Today sums it up as a disaster.