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 shoots 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.
