Bad Boys

Bad Boys launched Michael Bay’s career and cemented Will Smith as a movie star. Smith and Martin Lawrence play Miami narcotics detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett, mismatched partners who must recover $100 million in stolen heroin while protecting a witness. The plot is forgettable. The chemistry between Smith and Lawrence is not. Their improvisational riffing — much of which was genuinely ad-libbed — gave the buddy cop genre its most quotable duo since Riggs and Murtaugh.

Bay was 30 years old and making his first feature, and you can feel the hunger in every frame. The camera never stops moving, the colors are saturated to the point of hallucination, and the Miami sunset looks like it’s being photographed for a perfume commercial. It’s style over substance, but Bay’s style was so aggressive and so new in 1995 that it felt revolutionary.

Bad Boys earned $141 million on a $19 million budget and spawned a franchise. It proved that two charismatic leads could carry an action film through sheer force of personality, and it introduced Michael Bay’s visual vocabulary — low angles, golden hour, spinning cameras — that would define blockbuster aesthetics for the next two decades.