Just finished watching “Bad Boys: Ride or Die”. Pretty good movie, would recommend. I just wanna say, as someone who’s watched the first two movies, it’s really fascinating to see the differences in direction. The movie looks and sounds like the original Michael Bay movies, but you can tell it’s someone else calling the shots.
After thinking on it some more, these are what stood out to me as the differences:
1) There’s far less action. Sure, there’s still enough shootouts and chases to satisfy any action movie fan, but it’s not to the point where every five minutes is an action scene.
2) The action scenes are filmed and choreographed differently. Michael Bay’s action scenes feel like a war movie, as in he takes it as seriously as possible. Adil and Bilall’s action scenes feel like…art? It’s hard to describe, but you can tell the new directors are focused more on style and imagery over grittiness. Bay focuses on the violence while the new directors focus more on the spectacle.
3) As a follow-up to the previous note, there were certain scenes in the movie that just didn’t feel like Michael Bay’s work. I’m mainly referring to the ancestral plane scenes (not even a joke, the directors cited Black Panther as an influence). Those scenes felt like something Michael Bay would do only in a movie like Transformers, not the Bad Boys movies.
4) I can’t confirm this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Adil and Bilall are genuine fanboys of the original Bad Boys movies. The reason why I’m pointing this out is because if you go back to Bad Boys II, you can tell that Bay didn’t really give a shit about the story. It’s like he came up with the set pieces first, and then the reason why the set pieces exist. The new movies feel like they were made by people who genuinely loved the story of the first two movies and wanted to expand on them. Expand on the “lore”, I mean.
Think about it; Captain Howard actually had a major story arc instead of just being the stereotypical angry boss, the Zoepounders subplot came back, Reggie had his own side story after being introduced as a one-off gag character, there was more focus given to Mike’s emotional issues and Marcus being the more “mature” one, and so on.
I guess this is another way of me saying that the new directors are better at storytelling than Michael Bay, which really isn’t saying much. But it’s true! This is gonna sound harsh but the new Bad Boys movies feel…structured. The story sets stuff up and gives us payoffs, like Armando killing Captain Howard, then being redeemed/spared when he rescued Howard’s granddaughter. It’s noticeably different from Michael Bay’s work, which all feel like he’s making stuff up as he goes along since he just wants to get to the next action set piece.
(Side note: To be fair to Michael Bay, except for Pearl Harbor, I think he does great when it comes to military movies. The Rock was genuinely good, as well as 13 Hours. It’s when he branches off into literally any other genre that his weaknesses in storytelling come through)
