The original
Bad Boys movie launched three mainstream film careers on three wildly different paths. Will Smith went on to become one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood- an actor of surprising versatility- he can lay claim to being the most successful and recognisable African-American actors in the history of cinema. Michael Bay- who made his big screen debut with Bad Boys- became one of the wealthiest film makers in history, although he can realistically be considered to also be the worst, with a string of mindless CGI riddled blockbusters all of which seem to exist to provide him with occasion to blow up cars/planes/planets and stick his camera up the skirt of some pole-dancer or another. The third of the trio,
Martin Lawrence, has since carved out a lucrative career in the most basic of simpleton comedies Hollywood has ever inflicted upon a cinema going public, as typified by his most recent film
Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son. In spite of the Bad Boys sequel having been critically panned it still did improbably good business worldwide and in the years since there has been a wealth of online expectation that a final film would be made to complete the trilogy. And indeed in
September 2009, The Town screenwriter
Peter Craig was hired by Columbia to write a second sequel with the hope of attracting the interest of Will Smith. We've heard nothing of the project for the last 12 months, but when
Lawrence was asked by Digital Spy recently about the status of the project during his recent promotional visit to London, he claimed Bad Boys 3 was definitely still on;
'They're working on a script now, that's something I think looks very real. Will told me that he wanted to do it as well.'
Though we should remind ourselves that Will Smith has shown interest in no less than
I Am Legend 2, I Robot 2, Independence Day 2,
Hancock 2 and others and at one point a few years ago there were sequels to every one of his major hits being written by some Hollywood scribes somewhere - and in the end he chose
Men in Black 3, opening next summer. And really, in terms of Bad Boys 3, if the second movie was anything to go by, the ironic excess and charm of the originals one-liners will be almost impossible to replicate.