Bad Boys II
Directed by Michael BayEschewing the normal 'commentary track and production featurette' format of most DVDs, Bad Boys II, a two-platter Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment release (00619, $29), contains extensive and organized behind-the-scenes footage, perhaps the most behind-the-scenes material for one movie that has ever made it onto a DVD.
The 2003 summer blockbuster is a calculated amalgam of mayhem and comedy, with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence portraying Miami cops. Keeping a straight face, the film is able to use the talents of the two stars to relieve the dramatic tension with quips and rejoinders, while not breaking its veneer of seriousness, or, at least, not breaking it too much. In one sense, Smith and Lawrence evoke a long history of African-American comedy teams, bantering about minor irritations while seemingly oblivious to greater perils. There is a scene in which Lawrence is in a mortuary, reacting to corpses, for example, that fits right into a comedy tradition now widely condemned (but still, in all likelihood, secretly enjoyed). But the film is also a robust action feature, with fabulous car chase scenes and wild gunfights, and the pair are talented enough to shift into an action hero mode when necessary, just as they shift out of it to carry a viewer along between the thrills. At 147 minutes and with a very skimpy, no surprises plot, the film has to constantly stimulate a viewer's interest viscerally, and it succeeds in doing just that.
So there really isn't enough to it for a commentary track analysis, and thus Columbia TriStar hasn't bothered with one. What has been done instead is as captivating as the movie and somewhat more intriguing. The film is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The color transfer is fine and there are bullets whipping all around your viewing room on the jacked-up 5.1-channel Dolby Digital soundtrack. There is an alternate French audio track in 5.1 Dolby, optional English and French subtitles, and a trailer.
The second platter is semi-organized into overlapping thematic sections. There is one, for example, that is officially about the stunts and visual effects, although other sections also deal with the same material. Another section is subdivided into the film's major action scenes, and as each scene is selected, the viewer has the option to bring up the sequence from the film, the shooting script, the extensive storyboards, or the often annotated behind-the-scenes footage. There are a few interviews scattered through the material as well, so that you stay oriented to what is going on in a segment and what they are trying to achieve. It is the volume of the material, however, that really conveys a sense of the labor of filmmaking. Along with 7 minutes of funny but sensibly deleted scenes and a Jay Z music video, there are 134 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, most of it depicting what went on during the setups of various shots, how the major action sequences were staged, and what everybody was like when the cameras weren't rolling. Some of the car crashes and other stunt gags are as harrowing in reality as they are in the fiction of the movie. Nobody seems aware or willing to acknowledge that one stunt, a car crashing through a hillside shantytown, was done before, and better, by Jackie Chan in Police Story, but they are properly proud of some of the more original sequences, including an amazing freeway chase with cars falling off the back of a trailer and bouncing all over the place, for real. The director, Michael Bay, is seen in a few segments getting testy or otherwise impolite when his goals are not achieved, and the fact that he allowed the material to be included (there's also plenty of footage showing him as the dynamic, smiling leader, unfazed by the complexity and enormity of the production) indicates either his confidence in the DVD format as a worthy record of the moviemaking process, or his own obliviousness to the perils of human interaction.
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