The movie stars Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, both comic actors, both talented, both allowed to talk way too much in the course of this film. The dialogue runs on endlessly; consider, for example, the basic scene where the commanding officer reads out the two cops. He goes on, and on, and on, screaming at them. Later he screams some more.
There are also a lot of curious interludes in which Lawrence and Smith do verbal riffs, interrupting each other, stream of consciousness, finishing each other's sentences or not bothering to complete thoughts at all, to show a kind of easy familiarity, I guess. We are glad they know each other so well. We wish we knew them well enough to figure out what they think they're saying.
The plot: A criminal mastermind (Tcheky Karyo) engineers the theft of $100 million in heroin from the evidence locker at police headquarters. Lawrence and Smith are assigned to the case.
Smith asks Theresa (Theresa Randle), a hooker he knows, to keep an eye open for high rollers. Sure enough, she gets a call from a guy who's sky-high on drugs and wants to spend $2,000. She asks her friend Julie (Tea Leoni) to tag along. Julie isn't a hooker but, what the heck, the guy's so out of it they'll be back on the street with the dough in 15 minutes.
Theresa gets murdered, in an ugly, unpleasant scene. Julie witnesses it all, and contacts the cops. There is an ungainly subplot in which Lawrence, the family man, has to pretend to be Smith, the bachelor, and live for a few days with Julie, while meanwhile his wife gets suspicious, etc. This stuff isn't even recycled from old action movies; it's out of those Idiot Plots where people don't catch on to anything.
For example, why is Lawrence's apartment filled with photographs of Smith? Is Lawrence gay? Is Smith his boyfriend? He comes up with a sitcom-style excuse, to conceal the fact that they are actually in Smith's apartment. Unasked and unanswered is why Smith would have his apartment filled only with photos of himself. The answer, of course, is that the photos are there to support the vacuum-brained dialogue.
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