Absolutely amazing

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Bad Boys is a very gritty and tough action/drama starring Sean Penn as a young criminal who ends up in reform school. Sean is very good here and totally believable as juvenile delinquent and bad kid from the wrong side of the tracks. The film is taken from his point of view and humanizes the kids that society locks up and tries to forget about. The support cast is strong with Ally Sheedy as O'Brian's girl, Reni Santoni as juvenile detention officer, Alan Ruck of Ferris Bueller fame as Mick's buddy, Esai Morales as his nemesis and Clancy Brown with an awesome early performance as heavy Viking. Bad Boys plays as a very authentic juvenile jailhouse rock film. There is real good performances and depth to the material. Bad Boys is a very tough and violent movie that gives a pretty accurate portrayal of what these wayward boys must endure. In this setting, only the strong survive. Sean Penn is very convincing and is a very different character than he previously portrayed as Spiccoli in Fast Times In Ridgemont High. He showed early on that he is very talented and he has a lot of range. Bad Boys is classic and one of my favorite films that Sean Penn has done.

BAD BOYS is a gritty action drama about gang members who get into a violent rivalry and end up being incarcerated for their trouble. The setting is a juvenile detention centre, which brings this close in style to the hard-hitting British classic SCUM, starring Ray Winstone. BAD BOYS isn't quite that film's equal, but fans of the genre will be well served by the events of the plot.The film has a low budget and a few scenes of poor lighting where you can't see much that's going on. However, it's also grimly realistic and the prison setting is well realised. I found the first hour pretty slow but things pick up in the second half for some familiar prison rivalry and violent chaos unfolding. Sean Penn won plaudits for his believable performance, and rightly so, but the likes of Esai Morales, Ally Sheedy, Clancy Brown, and Eric Gurry also shine just as brightly. The ending is as powerful as it gets.

I look at this as a sequel to Fast Times at Ridgement High(1982). Jeff Spicoluoi has graduated from high school. Jennifer Jason Leigh is nowhere to be seen, Mr. Hand is dead, and Judge Reinhold is trapped inside Fred Savage's little preteen body. Jeff Spicoluoi has been kicked out of his parents' house for not having a job, the mean, tough, rough, wrong kind of love from any parent to any son or daughter, whether we as a son and daughter are adopted, a stepson or stepdaughter, or a real son and daughter belonging to real parents, a real Daddy and Mommy, Dad and Mom, Pa and Ma, Pops and Momma, WRONG! Wrong, wrong what I just said before. With no money to buy the stuff he was seen smoking in Fast Times at Ridgement High(1982), that stuff he was seen smoking was called pot, his dreams of being a star surfer go away, the dreams of being a star surfer go up in smoke, there's no more dreams of being a star surfer for Jeff Spicoluoi, because Jeff Spicoluoi does not have the smoking stuff to smoke out of his mouth, what we all as people like to call pot, the stuff that people smoke, because Jeff Spicoluoi is not alone. Everyone here on this world and planet here we call Earth smokes pot. That's why in Fast Times at Ridgement High(1982), in the movie we saw, Spicoluoi was a star surfer, Jeff Spicoluoi was smoking pot. Jeff Spicoluoi in this movie here I'm writing about on the computer, Bad Boys(1983), Jeff Spicoluoi has no pot, so he turns to and does bad stuff, because Jeff Spicoluoi does not have pot, Jeff Spicoluoi turns to and does crime. Jeff Spicoluoi gets tossed in jail because of crime, and Jeff Spicoluoi keeps pulling the punches, like another Irish guy in another movie, Jimmy Cagney in White Heat(1949). Jeff Spicoluoi gets out of jail, marries and divorces Madonna, works for the LAPD, and wins a couple of Oscars. A regret free life for Mr. Jeff Spicoluoi.

Prior to starring in the hard-edged 1983 drama Bad Boys, Sean Penn had proved his early promise in the TV movie The Killing of Randy Webster, played a memorable supporting role in Taps (with fellow newcomer Tom Cruise), and created the definitive California surfer dude as the perpetually stoned Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But it was Bad Boys that cemented Penn's reputation as a rare talent--an actor whose skill transcended his youth, revealing a depth and maturity that the majority of his acting peers could only aspire to. That gravity and emotional dimension is evident throughout Penn's performance here as Mick O'Brien, a chronic offender whose path to a Chicago juvenile corrections facility seems utterly preordained. The institution is hardly conducive to reformation--it's a jail for problem kids, and a cauldron for all the societal ills that sent kids there in the first place. Mick's there because he was involved in a shootout during a botched robbery of drugs from rival street gangster Paco Moreno (Esai Morales), whose little brother was killed when Mick accidentally ran him over with his getaway car. Overcrowding results in Mick and Paco's being sent to the same facility (one of the film's few stretches of credibility), and this leads to a rather predictable showdown that will take the jive prison's violence to its inevitable extreme. It's a shame this conclusion ultimately doesn't live up to the film's superior first hour, but Bad Boys remains a remarkably authentic, even touching portrait of troubled youth whose torment is conveyed through thoughtful and richly emotional development of characters. Director Rick Rosenthal (who had previously helmet Halloween II) maintains a vivid sense of setting within the correctional facility's cold walls, and through the performances of Penn and a superb supporting cast (including Ally Sheedy in her film debut as Mick's girlfriend), Bad Boys emerges as one of the best films of its kind, forcing the viewer to ask difficult questions about at-risk youth and the proper way to improve or at least preserve their endangered lives.