Director: Michael Bay
Year Released: 2003
Rating: 0.5
Will Smith represents gun toting, Conservative America, willing to go in and bust heads and not think about the consequences; Martin Lawrence is a stand in for Liberal America, going through its pacifist phase and taken with meditation and therapy to lower stress levels, wanting to 'sit down and talk about it.' Friction between these two (rather simple, rather obvious) ideologies run through this overlong, torrential blood/car bath, where vehicles get blown to smithereens as much as people do. Attempts at black humor through necrophilia, drug use and severed limbs are flubbed to the point of being distasteful (as in "bad bad taste") - Bay cares more about what angles to shoot the things that explode than script nuances or subtlety. Goes by the numbers the entire way, and achieves its goal, by the end, of liberating pacifist Lawrence from his namby-pamby healing meditation and reacquainting him with gratuitous shots of the Stars and Stripes, bullets to the head, and land-mines that blow bad dudes' torsos off.
