Bad Boys

Marcus Burnett is a henpecked family man. Mike Lowrey is a footloose and fancy free ladies' man. Both Miami policemen, they have 72 hours to reclaim a consignment of drugs stolen from under their station's nose. To complicate matters, in order to get the assistance of the sole witness to a murder, they have to pretend to be each other.

Critics and audiences split sharply on Bad Boys: professional reviewers found the Smith-Lawrence chemistry undermined by a lazy, formulaic script that leans on car chases and explosions whenever the story stalls, while general audiences responded far more warmly. The core complaint was not the stars — whose energy nearly everyone acknowledged — but that the production seemed to have invested far more in spectacle than in giving those stars something worth doing.