There is no irony in the title. The principal characters, an Irish-American kid and his sworn Hispanic enemy, are established very fast as very bad, and are soon enough gotten off the Chicago streets and into juvenile prison, one sooner than the other. This is a genre -- the prison film -- that lends itself to clichés of the rigidest sort, and director Rick Rosenthal, who made Halloween II and reminds us of the fact by advertising that title on a Chicago theater marquee, doesn't struggle against cliché, even in manner of presentation: e.g., the rape-victim's scream that merges with a subway roar. What he achieves, however, thanks to the strictest adherence to convention, is a completely enclosed, consistent, predictable universe in which every horrible happening is the inescapable consequence of character. No changes in character are ever forthcoming, or anyway not the sort of change that would satisfy a parole board -- but that's part of the unsentimentality of the movie. Bad Boys is scary in the way a horror movie is scary, and its characters are hardly more tractable or reasonable than werewolves. Sean Penn, Esai Morales, Reni Santoni. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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