by Lindy West
One cool thing about this movie is it’s got all the kinds of criminals. It’s got the Russian criminals! The KKK criminals! The Haitian criminals! A Cuban guy, I think! That’s all the kinds!
The Haitians in the semitruck start dropping their cargo, which is cars, on Will Smith to get him off their tail. These Haitians will NOT stop throwing cars at Will Smith! I wish this movie would stop perpetuating the old stereotypes about Haitians constantly throwing cars.
Smith and Lawrence go back to the office where their boss (JOEY! PANTS!) yells at them for not being “subtle” and “tactical” enough (i.e., totaling twenty-two cars and a boat and uncounted human lives [never mentioned]).
Over at his weird three-quarter-scale mansion (seriously, the ceiling in this one hallway is like five feet high and it is legitimately extremely weird and nobody says anything about it, they just stoop and shuffle around???), the Cuban ecstasy lord discovers that rats are eating all his money, and then says a good line: “Carlos, this is a stupid fucking problem to have, but it is a problem.” I laughed! His henchman agrees to call an exterminator.
Meanwhile, the bad boys are attempting to track down the Haitians, so they go to some Haitian guy’s extremely culturally sensitive burning-candle-and-spooky-baby-doll-head shop looking for leads.
Bad Boy: We’re looking for someone. Haitian blond with dreads.
Haitian Guy: Oh, Blondy-dread?
Sometimes I write fake dialogue and pretend that it’s real dialogue, as a joke. The above is not one of those times.
He refuses to tell them where Blondy-dread is, so they bash and destroy his entire livelihood with a stick. Serve and protect!
They track the Haitians to a rotting apartment filled, again, with burning candles and spooky baby doll heads (like, you know Haitians are…regular human people, right?) and immediately get into a horrific gun battle. One Haitian makes the toilet water go in Martin Lawrence’s mouth. Will Smith shoots another Haitian in the eyeball. Michael Bay does this shot where the camera circles around and around the wall, around and around and around and around and around, so if you accidentally swallowed rat poison earlier, you might want to check that part out. (Also, I don’t know, call me an SJW, but I think it kind of matters how many Haitians a cop shoots in the eyeball in one day?) Eventually, they find a Haitian camcorder with a tape in it, which will surely tell them the ????? they need to ???????????????????.
Now, one would assume that the Miami police department has, bare minimum, one VCR on one of those rolling carts they used to wheel into the classroom for movie day to perform the extremely basic task of playing the videotape that’s inside the Haitian camcorder. But I guess the cops have never needed to watch a video before 2003? Instead, Smith and Lawrence go to a crowded electronics store and bully some dweeb into accidentally playing the tape on all four hundred TV screens, which is uncomfortable (and possibly a crime?) because it’s completely a porno.
Then, I forget why, Smith and Lawrence go into a private room at the Best Buy for a quick heart-to-heart, but unfortunately the aforementioned dweeb switches all four hundred TV screens from the porno to a live feed of their feelings convo! Which is uncomfortable because Martin Lawrence is complaining at length about what Will Smith “did to his ass” and how his erection is now flaccid. Now everyone in the Best Buy thinks they’re gays!!!!!3
I have no idea what information they glean from the Haitian camcorder porno, but it is decided that they must go pose as exterminators to infiltrate the Cuban drug lord’s rat-infested mini-mansion. But first they have to literally go to exterminator school to learn how to fight bugs, which they do extremely badly, THANK GOD. LESS SHOOTING AND HOMOPHOBIA, MORE WILL SMITH AND MARTIN LAWRENCE EXTERMINATOR TRAINING MONTAGE. At the Cuban guy’s house, Lawrence sees two rats having sex and he’s like, “He’s straight pile-driving her! They fuck just like us!” HAHAHAHAHA!!! WOULD WATCH MARTIN LAWRENCE SEXUALLY DEGRADE A RAT FOR TWO-PLUS HOURS.
Their only job on this mission is to plant some kind of microphones in the house, or maybe tap the phones, who fucking cares, but instead of getting the job done and getting out of there ASAP, they both go tromping around the house, creepin’ and peepin’, until they get deeply and absolutely caught. Could you have done a worse job of this???? Will Smith discovers that the Cubans have chopped up a Russian and put him in a “tortilla bin” (what?), so they car-chase outta there in the exterminator van, presumably putting all actual employees of the REAL exterminator company, who still have to go to work tomorrow, in mortal peril. But who cares because they get away. Protect! And! Serve!
Holy shit, this movie is only HALFWAY OVER.
Next, Will Smith wears a suit that is three different shades of shiny purple with purple sunglasses. More like two-thousand-and-YEE-IKES!
Okay, there’s a thing I didn’t bother to tell you about earlier in the movie, but now it’s important. The Cuban drug lord is smuggling the ecstasy pills into America inside corpses inside coffins that are on boats. Then, they put money inside different corpses, or maybe the same corpses, and smuggle those back to Cuba. Here is another real line from the movie and not one I made up to make fun of the movie: “We need to put my money in coffins to Cuba faster!” Straightforward!
The bad boys grab Michael Shannon from the jail where he’s awaiting trial for being in the KKK at the beginning of the movie. They need him to do…something (?), so they put him in the trunk of their car and go on another car chase. Sometimes Michael Shannon will yell something hilarious, such as, “These men are violating my rights!” It’s funny when cops abuse their power!
The Cubans are driving a big van full of drugs / cash-stuffed human corpse turduckens. Smith and Lawrence chase them for so long that the corpses start falling out of the van, and it is very humorous! Haha, those are people’s relatives! Will Smith runs over somebody’s dad and his head pops off! Hahaha! Reminder: this is all to stop ecstasy from entering North America.
They sneak inside the Cuban crime mortuary, and Martin Lawrence accidentally eats two ecstasy pills out of a corpse’s rotten body cavity. They go to their captain’s house, where Martin Lawrence gets his erection back and why can’t this whole movie be Martin Lawrence on ecstasy at Joey Pants’s house?? Reader, it’s not.
They finally intercept all the money and the drugs, but unfortunately, the Cuban guy has intercepted Martin Lawrence’s sister and taken her back to Cuba. But Joey Pants won’t help! So they’re like, “We’ve just gotta do it ourselves, man.”
THAT IS ALREADY WHAT YOU DO! YOU HAVE NOT FOLLOWED ONE RULE THIS ENTIRE MOVIE!
But then, all their cop buddies are like, “We are also bad boys! We will go with you!” and the entire Miami police force leaves the country to invade a sovereign nation to save Martin Lawrence’s sister—who, by the way, works for the DEA! What are they doing to help? Is there truly no protocol for when a federal law enforcement agent gets kidnapped by a drug cartel? That’s never happened before?
Doesn’t matter because Smith and Lawrence have a “protocol” too, and it involves the phrase “throw a bag of cats and iguanas over the fence.” Nothing could go wrong!
After that, all they have to do is dig a tunnel under the Cuban guy’s lawn (how much are these Cuban people getting paid to dig this tunnel, BTW?), use a remote control car to distract some guys playing soccer, blow them up with a bomb, pop out of the hole in the lawn with a rocket launcher, jump out of a coffin and start shooting random landscapers, punch an elderly woman in the face, take a small child hostage, then race to Guantanamo Bay in a yellow Humvee, pulverizing the previously noted shantytown on the way. Like, those places aren’t sparsely populated—they are DENSELY OVERCROWDED WITH POOR PEOPLE AND CHILDREN. I mean, I like Gabrielle Union, but……??????
Now they’ve got the Cuban military shooting at them from behind and the American military shooting at them from the front, so they screech to a stop in a live minefield, and I’m sorry, but EVERYONE WOULD BE DEAD.
Then Martin Lawrence shoot
s the drug lord in the head and Will Smith and Gabrielle Union kiss.
This concludes………???……?………MIAMI.
RATING: 7/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 PLOT HOLE: Sometimes when Martin Lawrence and Will Smith capture a criminal, they triumphantly sing, “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do,” the theme from COPS, because they have defeated the “bad boys” (i.e., criminals). But then OTHER TIMES, they high-five and say, “Bad boys for life,” and THEY are the bad boys! So which is it!?!!?!??!? Get it together, movie!
2 I picked Bad Boys II instead of Bad Boys for this book because a hot sequel can attain a level of hype that the first movie in an eventual franchise just can’t. Bad Boys was a success. Bad Boys II was a WHOLE THING.
3 I forgot that in 2003 homophobia was normal as shit! The age of the metrosexual, I guess! Everything was vaguely homophobic, but also OBSESSED with gay men. Sometimes it is nice to live in the future.
The Real Monster Is Inspections
We open on some bushes. Scary bushes. You can tell the bushes are scary because a bunch of dudes in jumpsuits are standing near them looking scared. The bushes are all, “Rustle, rustle. Rustle, rustle.” There is definitely something in those bushes. Some sort of monster. “Come over here,” the bushes whisper. “Try me, I’m just bushes!” Suddenly, the monster begins to emerge. The leaves part. Is it a bigfoot? Is it a dino?
No!!!
It’s just some dumb forklift carrying a dumb box. The monster, it turns out, isn’t a monster at all—it’s a machine. The real monster, you see, is man. (Or else the real monster is forklifts. Unclear. Will circle back.)
Oh, except there actually are actual monsters in the box that the forklift is carrying. They’re called velociraptors, and they are the world’s biggest a-holes. Right away they wiggle out of the box and eat this dude named “the Gatekeeper,” and then they’re like, “OM GROM GROMPH. WASN’T EVEN HUNGRY—JUST ATE HIM TO FUCK WITH YOU GUYS #YOLO.” One of the velociraptors makes extended Six Sigma eye contact with this hunter dude (let’s call him “the Keymaster”) through the bars, like she’s thinking, “I shall bookmark you for later, Keymaster.” And she does.
Foreshadowing.
Now we’re in an amber mine in the Dominican Republic! Try to keep up! A lawyer is there, being annoying. “Waaaahhhhh, I want inspections! Inspections are my food!” yells the lawyer. “Mr. Hammond hates inspections,” says the guy in charge of the mine, all normal as though that isn’t the vaguest thing in the world to hate. The lawyer suggests that they get a certain “Dr. Grant” to do the inspection because of “insurance.” (Not sure why that’s the mine guy’s call, but bygones.) Mine guy isn’t into it. “Grant’s like me,” he explains. “He’s a digger.” Then the miner, who’s been mining this whole time BTW, gets very excited about something he’s just mined. It’s a piece of amber with a bug in it. The lawyer, feeling less appreciated than an old bug (and still very concerned about inspections), stomps off to sit on a tuffet somewhere and lick an oversize lollipop, probably. That’s a lawyer stereotype, right?
Cut to the Badlands. Dr. Grant (Sam Neill, incidentally an Instagram MUST-FOLLOW) is digging (OF COURSE) at a fossilized velociraptor skeleton, which is just sort of half-buried in one to two inches of soft sand, like the cap to your sunscreen, or Joey in the opening credits of Friends. Is that how easy it is to find a velociraptor? “I hate computers,” says Dr. Grant. Dr. Grant hates computers. Dr. Grant touches Laura Dern on the buns to establish that their relationship is caliente yet tender. Laura Dern, in double denim, is busy agitating for Dr. Grant to impregnate her with a small paleontological baby. No luck yet.
Wait, who’s that talking? UGH, it’s a kid. DR. GRANT HATES KIDS. They’re like computers but covered in food and hair! Even worse, this kid is talking talking talking, and he has no respect for dinos. “That doesn’t look very scary,” the kid says, eyeing the velociraptor with disdain. “More like a six-foot turkey.”
:-|
“Oh no,” says Laura Dern, shaking her head. She knows what’s coming. Dr. Grant is going to spill the intestines of an innocent child with his six-inch turkey claw AGAIN. (The paperwork alone!) But in the middle of his super-mean lecture about dino behavior and the fashionable disembowelment theories of the day, Dr. Grant is interrupted by the arrival of a helicopter full of Richard Attenborough’s hubris. Richard Attenborough (Mr. Hammond, mentioned earlier, hates inspections, etc.) has ruined the turkey dig. But it doesn’t matter. He’s there to invite Dr. Grant and Laura Dern to inspect his mysterious new theme park. Then this dialogue happens:
Hammond: There’s no doubt our attractions will drive kids out of their minds.
Grant: What are those?
Laura Dern: Small versions of adults, honey.
Solid joke!
Then there’s a scene of Newman eating breakfast. Later in the movie, breakfast eats Newman.
Foreshadowing.
Dr. Grant and Laura Dern hop into Richard Attenborough’s helicopter and point the pilot toward Costa Rica. Also on board is Jeffward Goldblum as mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm, about whom it is extremely difficult for me not to write in all caps, even though Jeff Goldblum has kind of become a played-out meme now, which I resent.
Jeff Goldblum explains that he’s not a mathemagician so much as a “CHAOTICIAN. Chaotician.”
Dr. Grant, being some sort of Flintstone who has never ridden in a motorized vehicle before, fumbles with the seat belts like a confounded granny in an infomercial for lids. The helicopter descends, and everyone hops into some jeeps. At this point, Richard Attenborough has flown four people all the way to Costa Rica without actually telling them why the fuck they’re going to Costa Rica. Presumably, they’ve been sitting in a tiny enclosed space staring at each other in silence for hours and hours. Nobody seems to think this is weird. Nobody is yelling at all.
The jeeps rumble deeper into the jungle. “HEY, RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH, WHAT’S WITH THIS BIG FENCE?” “DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT. IT’S DEFINITELY NOT FOR MONSTERS.”
Finally, it’s time for the Big Reveal. There’s dinos! Dinos everywhere! Dr. Grant pees his own pants, and then he pees Laura Dern’s pants too, and then a butterfly pees its pants and it causes a landslide in Calabasas. “We’re going to make a fortune with this place,” says the lawyer, who clearly doesn’t understand that greedy lines like that get you killed in Steven Spielberg movies.
“Welcome to Jurassic Park!”
Richard Attenborough leads them all into a little movie theater where he has a conversation with a piece of cartoon DNA named “Mr. DNA.” Turns out, Jurassic Park scientists were able to build their own “dahnasauwwwers” by extracting blood from the stomachs of dinosquitos, putting the blood in a jar with some frog DNA and glue, and then shaking it. Or something like that. I don’t know. Go ask B. D. Wong.
The dumb lawyer asks if B. D. Wong is “auto-erotica,” but he means “animatronic.” It is offensive how little the lawyer knows about B. D. Wong.
After watching a baby velociraptor hatch, Dr. Grant starts asking uncomfortable questions about how they control the dino populations. B. D. Wong explains that all of the animals at Jurassic Park are ladies because B. D. Wong is on top of his shit and he engineered them that way and why must you always question B. D. Wong?
Time to feed the raptors! The hunter man lowers an entire cow into the raptor cage, and they go fucking nuts. (Jurassic Park absolutely keeping the cow sling industry in the black.) Hunter guy gives a terrifying PowerPoint on how smart the raptors are, their SAT scores, their sudoku speed, their vengeful hunger for human intestines. Richard Attenborough tries to distract everyone with lunch—“Alejandro’s prepared a delightful menu for us. Chilean sea bass, I believe!”—but ALAN GRANT DOESN’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT CHILEAN SEA BASS. He just wants to stand around and worry about raptors. (Dude, Alejandro probably worked really hard on that!)
Okay. Then these kids show up. Disregarding why anyone would bring childr
en to an uninspected monster island, everyone gets back in the jeeps and they head out for a tour.
“Hold on to your butts,” says Samuel L. Jackson (Jurassic Park’s chief engineer), demonstrating that he’s the type of cool dude who says things like, “Hold on to your butts,” possibly even twice in one day. (Foreshadowing.)
They don’t see any dinosaurs right away, but that’s not really important because Newman is busy fucking up everything on earth. See, Newman figured out a get-rich-quick scheme called “steal the dinosaur embryos and sell them to a shadowy warlock” because that’s really who you want to have control of your rogue dinosaur embryos. Just the ne’er-do-welliest fool on earth. In order to get the embryos and get out of the park undetected, Newman shuts down the security system. AGAIN. REALLY PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE WITH THE DINOS HERE.
Over in the jeep, everyone is irritated that they haven’t seen a T. rex yet and Jeff Goldblum is doing philosophy.
Jeff Goldblum: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.
Laura Dern: Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the earth.
MGTOW Lawyer for Sure in His Head: MISANDRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Everyone stops to help a Triceratops with a tummy ache and dig through its mammoth dump. (Fun fact: Laura Dern never goes anywhere without her elbow-length dump gloves. Both Laura Dern’s character in this movie and the actual Laura Dern.)
Uhhhhh, okay, let’s fast-forward. This is taking forever. The T. rex gets out. The lawyer tries to hide in a toilet house, but T. rex finds him immediately because this is the ’90s, so T. rexes hate lawyers. Newman gets eaten by some fancy lads (GOOD), while everyone else runs around screaming, or holds perfectly still, depending on their prior knowledge of dinosaur eyeballs. They all spend a long time trying to escape dinosaurs and sometimes getting covered in boogers. Dr. Grant pulls an extremely hilarious and appropriate prank involving an electric fence and some severely traumatized children. Everything is fucked.