'Bad Boys For Life' brings a deservedly dead franchise back for more testosterone-fueled carnage

The makers of “Bad Boys For Life” — the third movie in an action franchise that lay comatose for 17 years — must have been thrilled when this week’s Academy Award nominations came out. 

After all, if toxic masculinity was good enough to get rafts of nominations for “Joker” and “The Irishman,” certainly this slab of testosterone-driven spectacle will be in clover.

It turns out that Miami Police detectives Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) have been doing what they were doing in the first “Bad Boys” back in 1995: Busting bad guys and living large. For Mike, that high living means driving his Porsche at high speeds — but, in the movie’s prologue, it’s to get his family-centered partner, Marcus, to the hospital to be there for the birth of his first grandchild.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, Isabel Aretas (played by Mexican superstar Kate del Castillo), the wife of a deceased drug kingpin, is busting out of prison and plotting her revenge. Her weapon is her son, Armando (Jacob Scipio), a talented assassin and sniper who starts knocking off his mama’s list of everyone who took down her family’s drug empire. At the top of that list is Mike — who barely survives Armando’s first attempt at murdering him.

When Mike gets back to good health, he wants to go after whoever shot him. His boss, Capt. Howard (Joe Pantoliano — wow, it’s been a minute), tells him to leave the investigation to Miami PD’s new task force, with the unfortunate acronym AMMO. The group of young tech-savvy hotshots (played by Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig and Charles Melton) is led by an ambitious lieutenant, Rita (Paola Nuñez), whom Mike briefly dated. Mike considers going rogue, and gets pushback from Marcus, who is retiring from the force.

Of course, Marcus gets pulled back into the action, as Mike and the AMMO crew track down a chain of players, each one getting his own over-amped action set piece. The directing team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah — they go by All & Bilall — never face an action sequence where they couldn’t add more smoke, more gunplay, more fire, just more, more, more. Michael Bay, the director of the first two installments (and has a laughably awkward cameo here), would be proud.

The most striking thing about “Bad Boys For Life” is how the script — credited to three guys, Chris Brener, Peter Craig and Joe Carnahan — shifts erratically from the loud, jokey style of its predecessors into histrionics about Mike and Marcus’ loyalty to each other, summed up in their creed of “ride together, die together.” It’s as if the filmmakers are trying to reverse-engineer this idiotic franchise into the self-important seriousness of the “Fast & Furious” films.

To do so, though, requires a plot twist that’s meant to give Smith a moment of hardcore acting, but is so ludicrous as to prompt gales of audience laughter. As the movie devolves to an overblown ending, and a mid-credit scene suggesting a pre-planned sequel, the title “Bad Boys For Life” feels like a threat.

——

‘Bad Boys for Life’

★

Opens Friday, January 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout, sexual references, and brief drug use. Running time: 123 minutes.