1. Gus Van Sant's Elephant
2. Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men
3. Clint Eastwood's Mystic River
4. Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Volume 1
5. Peter Weir's Master & Commander
6. David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls
7. Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa
8. Alejandro Gonzalez-Innaritu's 21 Grams
9. Billy Ray's Shattered Glass
10. Michael Bay's Bad Boys II
Runners-Up: Capturing the Friedmans, In America, Elf, Dirty Pretty Things, In the Cut, Bus 174, The Good Thief, Winged Migration, The Missing, Cold Mountain, Lost in Translation, House of Sand and Fog, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Fog of War, Open Range, Swimming Pool, Intolerable Cruelty.
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3 comments:
You know, even though I didn't much care for Bad Boys II, I did NOT think it was anywhere near the disaster that the critics thought it was. I gave it a near-miss grade of **1/2. I thought that for the most part the action was excellent but that the chemistry between Lawrence and Smith was nowhere near as prevalent or effective as the explosive near-masterpiece that was the first film. So, basically, for me it was good, but more of a letdown than anything. Glad to see someone finally like it though.
I happen to think that Bad Boys 2 is a cornerstone of the genre. Now, there is no doubt that my personal involvement with the film also sways my opinion just a tad, but regardless, the pure action filmmaking on display in this film is pretty much second to none. That highway car chase sequence with the flipping cars is still a benchmark in my book.
The film is completely cliched, which everyone involved in the making of it new right off the bat. I definitely disagree with your statement that their chemistry wasn't up to par, though. Smith and Lawrence are a fantastic team, and while the film that they were in the second time around was about 150% larger in scale than the original outing, I still thought they were a dynamic duo.
Bay's sense of color, composition, pacing, timing, and visceral impact is pretty much unmatched. It's one of my go-to action movies to watch when I just want to see some beautiful destruction. And the gleeful R-rated-ness on display in Bad Boys 2 is something that's in short supply these days. I mean, can you imagine Bay and Bruckheimer and everyone else involved in the making of this franchise going soft with a PG-13 rating, ala those bull-shit artists over at Fox with the Die Hard franchise? Talk about a group of ball-less morons.
Yeah, Live Free or Die Hard was some kind of a disaster. The Joker would say, "What happened? Did your balls drop off? HMM?" :P
And oh yeah, that chase sequence was AWESOME. I seriously don't get the hate, even with my reservations.
Ask me some days, and I give the movie ***. But I suppose that maybe I shouldn't have watched it so close after seeing the first one. Maybe that's problem...
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