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‘Bad Boys 3’ Confronts Will Smith’s Legacy As Hollywood’s Biggest Post-9/11 Movie Star

This article is more than 4 years old.

On the surface, Bad Boys For Life (which earned $6.4 million on Tuesday, down just 39% from Monday, for a $79 million five-day domestic cume) is no different from the “aging action heroes come to terms with their twilight years” sequels that have been all the rage since (at least) Live Free or Die Hard in 2007. What sets Bad Boys For Life apart is its emphasis on the morality of those actions. Paired with Gemini Man (now available to rent or buy as of yesterday) from last October and Spies in Disguise from last month, Bad Boys For Life makes for a fascinating textual examination of Will Smith coming to terms with the end of his time as a top-tier movie star and his legacy in terms of how that stardom was achieved and what he put out into the world.  

Will Smith was among the chief beneficiaries of Hollywood’s drive toward big-budget fantasy and escapism in the mid-2000’s. Realizing early that the path to box office domination and global stardom was through sci-fi action movies, Smith broke through first with Bad Boys and then with the one-two punch of Independence Day ($817 million worldwide) in July of 1996 and Men in Black ($589 million global) in July of 1997. He would follow that up with Tony Scott’s grounded (and politically-topical) surveillance thriller Enemy of the State. Smith correctly noted that A) going toe to toe with Gene Hackman increased his reputation as an actor and B) the very idea that he was the second choice after Tom Cruise passed was a huge deal for a black actor.

Enemy of the State is an ACLU-friendly tech thriller where rightwing politicians use surveillance technology to commit and cover up nefarious deeds, forcing our heroic labor lawyer to clear his name and save our right to privacy. Another crack at making the July 4 holiday into “Big Willie Weekend,” Wild Wild West earned just $222 million worldwide on a $170 million budget. Miserable reviews and production issues notwithstanding, what stood out then and now is how bluntly the fantasy western acknowledges racism and declares that racism is a motivator for racist villains to do villainy. Kenneth Branagh’s Confederate baddie is openly bigoted in a way that would never fly today, and his motivations for wanting to overthrow a post-Civil War America are laid out in the open.

After the disappointment of Wild Wild West and the financial underperformances of both The Legend of Bagger Vance ($39 million on an $80 million budget in 2000) and Michael Mann’s openly political Ali (strong reviews and an Oscar nomination for Smith, but just $88 million on a $107 million budget) in 2001, the actor retreated. Men in Black II earned miserable reviews but $441 million worldwide in the summer of 2002. Bad Boys II ($273 million on a $130 million budget) earned allegations of fascism and glamorizing American imperialism, which is both arguably true (the climax where our heroes just level an entire impoverished Cuban village because Americans are choosing to use drugs is one for the think piece history books) and presumably irrelevant to most moviegoers who just enjoyed its action/comedy pleasures.

Men in Black II and Bad Boys II were the start of a period where Will Smith was the biggest star in the world. From 2002 to 2008, he opened a string of big movies to big openings and relatively large commercial success mostly on the strength of his face on the poster. He didn’t just open sci-fi actioners like I, Robot ($347 million on a $120 million budget in July of 2004), or franchise flicks like Men in Black 2. He found major success in animated films (A Shark Tale, $364 million/$75 million/2004), romantic comedies (Hitch, $368 million/$70 million/2005), dramas about economic mobility (The Pursuit of Happyness, $307 million/$55 million/2006), horror flicks (I Am Legend, $585 million/$150 million/2007) and superhero movies (Hancock, $624 million/$150 million/2008).

Those two were so ridiculously successful even for Smith that the comparative comedown of the late 2008 drama Seven Pounds (a grimdark fable about a man committing suicide for the purposes of organ donation to atone for a fatal accident) “only” earning $168 million on a $55 million budget was seen as a disaster. Smith arguably panicked and/or retreated. His next movie, four years later, was the $225 million Men in Black III, which earned surprisingly good reviews and grossed $623 million worldwide. But Hancock was the end of a time when Will Smith, sans franchise or IP, could push a film toward blockbuster status all by himself, which is when pretty much every movie star save for Leonardo DiCaprio stopped being able to do that.

That 2002-2008 period is also the six years following the 9/11 attacks. Seven Pounds arrived a month after Barack Obama’s electoral triumph. By coincidence or design, the various Will Smith star vehicles of this period mostly eschewed of-the-moment politics, either encasing their themes in fantastical metaphor (Hancock is a parable for America’s proverbial role as “world cop” and the value of not burning the village to save it) or existing as straight-up escapist fare. Yes, I would qualify the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” true-life triumph portrayed in The Pursuit of Happyness as borderline fantasy. That Chris Gardner’s story of an impoverished single father becoming a stockbroker via an unpaid internship is such a miraculous story somewhat undercuts the “only in America’ nature of its uplift.

As the biggest movie star of the 2000’s, Will Smith was also, by default, a leader in bread-and-circuses entertainment during a period of political turmoil. By virtue of often playing a law enforcement enforcer before, during and after his peak stardom period (a cop in Bad Boys, I, Robot and Bright, a superhero in Hancock, a super villain who saves the day in Suicide Squad, an extraterrestrial immigration enforcer in Men In Black, a soldier in Independence Day) or highlighting an arguably conservative version of economic mobility, Smith was by default upholding the status quo. What we’ve seen via Bad Boys For Life, Spies in Disguise and Gemini Man is a retrospective evaluation of the messages being put out by Will Smith’s movies and by action/fantasy blockbusters in general.

Ang Lee’s Gemini Man tells of a career hit man on the verge of retirement who is hunted by essentially a younger version of himself in the form of a clone. Beyond the gimmick of “old Will Smith” acting against “young Will Smith,” the film is about an older man looking at his younger self with regret and, in this fantasy context, hoping to lead this man on a better path before it’s too late. Conversely, in Spies in Disguise, a young gadget tech (Tom Holland) goes on a mission with a super spy (Smith) and teaches him that the hero doesn’t have treat violence as a first resort. The kid teaches the adult to be better. M. Night Shyamalan’s underrated After Earth splits the difference, but I digress.

Spies in Disguise, surprisingly violent for a PG-rated spy toon, is very much a critique of the eye-for-an-eye mentality of the modern action thriller. The main baddie (Ben Mendelsohn) has reason to be vengeful toward our superspy Lance Sterling, who realizes with horror that his “blow them up and let god sort them out” philosophy has grim consequences even when “they” are indeed bad guys. Lance Sterling is a stereotypical Will Smith action hero/James Bond-ish superspy, but his cavalier attitude toward lethal solutions and collateral damage presents him as a problem to be solved. In both action movies, the protagonist’s life of government-sanctioned murder has left him alone with nothing to show for it and, to paraphrase Mel Gibson’s underrated Edge of Darkness, nobody to bury him.

This “nobody left to bury you” mentality pops up in Men In Black 3 as well, beginning with a funeral for the former boss of the MIB (Rip Torn) who has no friends and whose work colleagues don’t even have anything of value to say about him. And the “you can be a better good guy if you actually act like a good guy” philosophy is absolutely what Hancock is about. Peter Berg took the U.S. foreign policy parables to a comic extreme in Battleship, but I digress. Bad Boys For Life is a culmination of where Will Smith seemingly is, emotionally and philosophically, as a former mega-star reckoning with the entertainment (and implied messaging) he put out in the world during a crucial moment in history.

The action sequel acknowledges its existence as a violent action movie (there’s an early moment where Martin Lawrence’s Marcus admits that his line of work has involved breaking the whole “that shall not kill” commandment on many occasions) and a police-centric thriller in a #BlackLivesMatter era. That’s something that non-white movie stars have been dealing with as Hollywood’s “baby steps” toward inclusivity has seen black actors like Chadwick Boseman getting their own major studio cop thriller vehicles that would have been par for the course for white actors in the 1990’s. In 2019, a movie like 21 Bridges is A) less frequent, B) less commercial and C) forced to reckon with the newfound (overdue?) notion that being a movie cop doesn’t automatically make you a movie hero.

The cultural critique of the action movie archetype isn’t new (Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven was 28 years ago), but the expectation to acknowledge that shade of grey in portraying a person in blue, especially if you look more like Naomi Harris than Jamie Lee Curtis, is a new burden that barely existed in the days of Rush Hour and Die Hard with a Vengeance. Heck, in 1995, the very idea of a buddy cop action thriller like Bad Boys with two black leading men was itself downright aspirational. That Hollywood’s 2000’s-era obsession with four-quadrant action fantasy global blockbusters (about white guys becoming “the special”) wiped out inclusivity gains made by Anaconda, Waiting to Exhale, Bad Boys and Rush Hour means Bad Boys for Life still feels aspirational in 2020.

Nonetheless, Bad Boys For Life openly acknowledges the moral compromises of being a stereotypical action hero, both in terms of blow back (no spoilers, but “this shit” eventually gets real) and in having a life only defined by your violent and adrenaline-focused occupation. Like Smith’s protagonists in Men in Black 3, Gemini Man and Spies in Disguise, Mike Lowry’s lifetime of body counts and a lack of attachments has left him nearing his twilight years with nothing to show for it. Without going into third act details, the film presents newfound information that causes Lowry to reevaluate his legacy, the consequences of his actions and his entire “bad ass superhero cop” persona. The film’s climax feels at peace with the culminations of both Gemini Man and Spies in Disguise.

All three films serve as metaphors for Will Smith’s current introspection in terms of the kinds of movies that made him a super star and the role he played in shaping pop culture in the post-9/11 era. Spies in Disguise and Gemini Man are unlikely to receive sequels, but Bad Boys 4 is already in development. Will this introspective look at the morality of the conventional Hollywood action hero continues in the next chapter? or if Mike’s moral journey is merely a temporary pit stop. And, yes, Bad Boys For Life is still a Bad Boys movie. But it also presents an engrossing look at a rich, famous and successful actor looking back at the content that made him, during a crucial historical period, the biggest movie star in the world.

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