First off, I am not about to review the Michael Bay film where Will Smith and Martin Lawrence shoot people and blow things up.  Instead, this Bad Boys is a film from 1983 where Sean Penn doesn’t shoot anyone but that’s mostly because he can’t get his hands on a gun.  And, at one point, a radio does blow up.  So, perhaps this Bad Boys has more in common with the Michael Bay Bad Boys than I originally realized.

Anyway, Bad Boys is about Mick O’Brien (Sean Penn), who is a 16 year-old criminal from Chicago.  One night, when one of his crimes goes wrong, Mick’s best friend (Alan Ruck) is killed and Mick accidentally runs over the brother of rival gang leader, Paco (Esai Morales).  Mick is sent to juvenile detention where he and his sociopathic cellmate, Horowitz (Eric Gurry), team up to overthrow the two “leaders” of their block, Viking (Clancy Brown, with scary blonde hair) and Tweety (Robert Lee Rush).  Meanwhile, Paco is arrested for raping Mick’s girlfriend, JC (Ally Sheedy), and soon finds himself living on the same cell block as Mick.

And it all leads to … violence!

(In the movies, everything leads to violence.)

Bad Boys is one of those films that seems to show up on cable at the most random of times.  I’ve never quite understood why because it’s not like Bad Boys is a particularly great film.  It’s hard to see anything about this film that would lead a programmer to say, “Let’s schedule 100 airings of Bad Boys!”  If anything, it’s the epitome of a good but not that good film.  On the one hand, you have to appreciate a film that attempts to take a serious look at both juvenile crime and the true life consequences of tossing every “lawbreaker” into a cell and locking the door.  People fetishize the idea of punishing criminals but they rarely consider whether those punishments actually accomplish anything beyond satisfying society’s obsessive need for revenge.  (And it’s interesting to note that the problems of 1983 are not that much different from the problems of 2015.)  On the other hand, Bad Boys is way too long, heavy-handed, and repetitive.  This was one of Sean Penn’s first roles and, much like the film itself, he’s good without being that good.  Watching his performance, you get the feeling that James Dean would say, “Nice try.”

However, the film is saved by two actor.  First off, there’s Clancy Brown as the stupid but intimidating Viking.  With his bad skin, blonde hair, and a permanent snarl on his face, Brown makes Viking into a character who is both ludicrous and scary.  And then there’s Eric Gurry as the small and demonic Horowitz.  According to his imdb page, Gurry long ago retired from acting but anybody who sees Bad Boys will never forget him.