Bad Boys For Life review: Smith and Lawrence's flame-scorched return hits the action movie sweet spot

Dirs: Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah; Starring: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Paola Nú?ez, Joe Pantoliano, Kate del Castillo, Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Charles Melton. 15 cert, 124 mins.

Michael Bay’s Bad Boys films are rarely spoken of as milestones, but cinema wouldn’t be in the state it is today without them. The original, released in 1995, showed that mainstream audiences were ready to cheer on a non-white action hero: specifically Will Smith, whom the streetwise, Miami-set action comedy transformed from Fresh Prince into movie star.

And its startlingly mindless and mean-spirited 2003 sequel – the film Bay made after being laughed out of town for the would-be-respectable Pearl Harbor – proved that same audience’s appetite for wanton, zero-consequence destruction had grown almost limitless.

It’s hard to imagine the Fast & Furious franchise existing in its present, billion-dollar-spinning state without Bad Boys having first paved the way – so it makes sense that this belated third instalment should owe the series such an obvious reverse debt. Smith and Martin Lawrence both return as Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett, two (now generously) seasoned detectives from the Miami Police Department.

But they’re surrounded by a makeshift family of racially diverse – if uniformly gorgeous – younger colleagues from the department’s new technical division, whose chief (Paola Nú?ez) is an old flame of Smith’s Lowrey. But when another, less affectionate figure from Lowrey’s past resurfaces and tries to assassinate him one night in South Beach, it’s the millennials that take up the case, with Lowrey on board as a consultant.

Lawrence’s Burnett, meanwhile, has just become a grandfather, and he takes this as his cue to retire, which leads to much larksome cross-cutting between the two 50-something men’s very different daily routines. (Lowrey roars around town in a Porsche 911, while Burnett now prefers a beige Nissan.)

The film is less interested in getting older than it is plumbing America’s toxic generation gap for easy laughs, but there is a touching comic sequence in which Lawrence retouches Smith’s greying goatee with hair dye: Midnight Cocoa Bean, in case you want to get the look.

Naturally, the stars’ separation lasts all of 45 minutes of screen time, after which they reunite for around an hour of flame-scorched action and quickfire banter that mostly lives up to expectations of the Bad Boys brand. Directorial duties have been assumed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the Belgian pair behind 2018’s Gangsta, while Bay’s involvement is limited to a cameo as a wedding toastmaster. El Arbi and Fallah might lack their predecessor’s genius eye for trash-blast awe and willingness to test the bounds of taste until they snap. But they wrangle the snappy duo and group dynamics well, and stage the action stylishly and lucidly.

A midnight motorcycle chase through the city is the pick of the set pieces, invoking Mad Max: Fury Road and somehow living to tell the tale – and of course Smith and Lawrence bicker amusingly throughout, if a little less acidly than they once did. Both deploy the s-word as reflexively as blinking – which somehow never stops being amusing; Lawrence finds more ways to say it than Eskimos have words for snow – but next to the exploding heads, ogling camerawork and car chases through the Uffizi Gallery in Bay’s new Netflix film 6 Underground, there’s something soothing, even quaint, about it.

A quarter-century on from its inception, Bad Boys has become something which would have once seemed inconceivable: quite sweet.