America Wants to Return to 2004. The 'Bad Boys' Movies Are How It Will Happen.

Dad Movies #6

It still blows my mind that “Will” is short for “Willard.” Frank Masi/Sony Pictures Entertainment

America has moved to the right. We’ve been feeling the cultural vibe shift since the end of the pandemic, in politically incorrect stand-up comedy and gender essentialist memes and the increasing popularity of country music and a million other things, but the election results confirm that it’s not an ambient feeling, it’s a material political reality. Even California, where I live, rejected ballot measures increasing the minimum wage and banning prison labor but passed one increasing punishment for certain drug and theft convictions. Some Democrat-run hellhole this is.

The vibe feels a lot like 2004, when George W. Bush won the popular vote in his reelection and Arnold Schwarzenegger was driving around Sacramento in a Hummer, but even dumber and meaner. At best, a lot of voters don’t care about anything except the price of groceries. At worst, they love Trump and the imbecilic cruelty he represents. Intellectually, I can understand voting for him even if you’re not a devout Republican partisan. If you are dissatisfied with the status quo, the Democrats do not offer a compelling alternative. I can even understand liking his personality. Dad Shows knows that assholes can be entertaining. But I can’t understand looking at him and seeing anything other than a rapidly deteriorating old man who can no longer form a coherent thought. People are either totally delusional or they see how bad he is and they just don’t care. Trump’s reelection and the Democrats’ failure to prevent it are part of the morally bankrupt cultural malaise we’re living in. 

Dad Boys for Life 

This week, I wanted to write about a Dad Movie I felt would help me process the moment. I considered Reagan, the recent biopic of Ronald Reagan starring Dennis Quaid. I thought watching that box office hit would be a way to contextualize America’s rightward shift through the rise of the parallel universe of conservative cinema. But I try not to watch things I know I’m not going to like unless I’m getting paid for it, and since Reagan is currently only available on VOD, I would have to pay to watch it. Not going to happen.

So I’ve decided instead to think about the present and the future by looking to the past. I’m going to watch director Michael Bay’s 2003 action comedy Bad Boys II, a movie I’ve never seen but is often talked about on Twitter as the epitome of post-9/11 cinema, a perfect Bush-era artifact of those years’ brand of nihilism and stupidity. And, of course, the fact that it’s gotten two successful sequels in the 2020s perfectly embodies the stuck culture era, and the fact that the second one made $400 million two years after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars is a repudiation of cancel culture. 

Bad Boys II seems like the exact type of thing culture is cycling back toward. There will be more movies and shows like it — including a fifth Bad Boys movie. So I’m going to watch it now and see what ill omens it bodes for the future. I’ll be back after this screenshot.

“Shake Ya Tailfeather” was the #1 song on the Billboard 100 the week of my 14th birthday

Okay, I watched Bad Boys II. It’s set in Miami, Florida, a city and state whose rightward shift has outpaced the rest of the country’s. Diddy was the “executive music consultant.” There’s a very dark energy radiating off this movie. 

Thematically, Bad Boys II could get made now with pretty minimal changes. It’s about the tension between a man who has been to therapy and gotten in touch with his feelings and a man who has not, which has become an even bigger cultural divide in the past 21 years. Alpha chads and beta soy boys. Martin Lawrence is learning how to articulate his feelings and apologize when he’s wrong and things like that, while Will Smith is a proudly macho guy who can only express anger. This was before the phrase “toxic masculinity” entered the lexicon, but they’d say it if Bad Boys II came out now. 

For all the misanthropic stuff in Bad Boys II, like the played-for-laughs scene of dead bodies from a morgue falling out of a van and getting decapitated by a car, the requisite gay jokes are actually not that bad by the standards of the time. I wonder if a side effect of the shift back to early 2000s culture will be a revival of off-color straight guy jokes in mainstream entertainment. As Hollywood realizes how much it’s losing the young male audience to independent creators (podcast comedians, specifically), it may try to re-embrace them with a mild return to vulgar wave comedy (“a period of time between roughly 1990 to 2008 where pop culture focused on entertaining heterosexual men in their 20s and 30s”). It’s already starting to happen. The Farrelly Brothers and Jack Black, who made Shallow Hal together, have a goofy PG-13 Christmas comedy coming out where Black plays the devil. There’s a diarrhea joke in the trailer. Society has progressed past the point that there will ever be anything like I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry again, but we may see a slight re-normalization in mainstream entertainment of stuff like the gay double entendre bit in Bad Boys II. Or maybe Hollywood’s rightward shift might stop at apolitical, with diverse casts but without the themes of race and class that have been dominant in the past decade, without tipping all the way into full-on anti-wokeness. We’ll see.

Unfortunately, we won’t see a revival of what’s genuinely good in Bad Boys II, the absolutely insane action. They don’t make movies with Heat-style urban gun battles that turn into lengthy freeway car chase scenes with real explosions anymore because they’re too dangerous and expensive. Movies are worse as a result. As a culture, we really are losing the ability to make good things like we used to due to skill and expense issues. 

I followed up Bad Boys II with Bad Boys: Ride or Die, which came out this year, in order to directly compare the style of 2003 with the style of 2024, and things are bleak. Bad Boys II may have an ugly soul, but at least it has one. I am not the first person to point out that Michael Bay is a visionary auteur filmmaker who happens to make proudly stupid movies. The speed and energy of his cuts and camera moves, the bizarre angles he shoots from, the explosions and the ultraviolence, it’s all incredibly distinctive and visually enticing. It feels alive. Adil & Bilall’s Ride or Die, on the other hand, is so flat. There’s a lot less action, and what action there is relies on CGI. They move the camera so much more slowly than Bay, and don’t cut with the same urgency. The lighting and production design is bland. It looks like a Netflix movie. It’s no fun. 

Bad Boys: Ride or Die clarified something for me. The reboot-and-revival-obsessed culture of permanent nostalgia we live in is about trying to recapture a lost sense of fun. “Remember when things used to be fun? Make America Fun Again.” These obviously aren’t the only two reasons, but people re-elected Trump because they want to go back to a time when things cost less money and they could laugh at jokes without getting in trouble for it. They want to go back to a time when everything didn’t feel so heavy. There’s no going back, though. Things will always be more expensive now, and Trump isn’t going to fix that. And the self-consciousness and anger and fear that politics and social media have worked together to instill in us make us incapable of having fun like we used to. Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a shrinkflated and sanitized version of Bad Boys II that feels bad and unfun to watch because it’s devoid of meaning. We can’t do a hollow imitation of early 2000s aesthetics and expect to enjoy it just because we used to. We’ve changed just enough to not be able to go back to the way things were. The more we try to change it back, the less fun we will have. The only way out is to try new things, both culturally and politically.

If going back to 2004 means we’re free from the tyranny of smartphones, though, then gas up the Hummer and crank up the Hoobastank. The phones are the real enemy of the people.

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-I reviewed Say Nothing, FX’s limited series adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent nonfiction book about the Troubles. The show does a pretty remarkable job of keeping the spirit of Radden Keefe’s nuanced and narratively compelling book. It’s about heavy subject matter but never feels like homework. Check it out on TV Guide.

-Even if you don’t watch Fire Country — and if you’re reading this, you probably don’t; it’s a Mom Show — you might enjoy this interview I did with Diane Farr for Parade. She made her directorial debut on last week’s episode, and I found her insights about how acting and writing prepared her for directing really fascinating.