BAD BOYS FOR LIFE

R, 123 minutes. Waterford, Lisbon. The third edition of the “Bad Boys” franchise starts as it must do: With a gleaming Porsche swerving at impossible speeds through Miami traffic under the expert control of Will Smith, with Martin Lawrence growing very sick beside him. The engine snarls, the car repeatedly fishtails and strains. Smith looks over to his partner with alarm and points out that the interior of the sports car is hand-stitched leather. Lawrence’s cheeks bulge; he’s about to hurl: “You better drink it,” the driver barks. All is good. We’ve again got Smith’s cocksure Detective Mike Lowrey beside Lawrence’s more cautious Marcus Burnett. There’s the customary playful banter between opposites. We’ve got sunny, titillating Miami and we are inches from death but really never that close. We’re in our 1990s comfort zone. You can almost hear it: “Bad boys, bad boys/Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do/When they come for you?” So it’s so disappointing that “Bad Boys for Life “soon swerves into weird neighborhoods and gets bloated as it tries to get deep, trying to explore topics like religion, mortality, biological determinism, individual legacy and aging. It’s oddly flat and unfunny and has strayed so far from its gritty roots that it might be called “Bad Boys for Life Insurance.” Sure, you can’t stay still. Smith and Lawrence are both past 50 and their characters can’t keep to the same formula of “muscle shirts and body counts,” as Burnett argues. But do we really want Burnett to straightfaced tell a Buddhist parable about a horse and then ask Lowrey about how he can overcome his own trauma? — Mark Kennedy, Associated Press

BIRDS OF PREY (AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN)

R, 109 minutes. Through today only at Westbrook. Still playing at Waterford, Stonington, Lisbon. The best thing to come out of 2016’s much-derided DC antihero team-up “Suicide Squad” was Margot Robbie’s inspired take on Harley Quinn, the self-proclaimed “Joker’s girl” and quirky chaos clown. Robbie’s Quinn, with her colorful pigtails and baseball bat, instantly became an icon, a perennial Halloween costume, eclipsing even her lesser half, Jared Leto’s heavily tattooed Joker. But enough about him; the Joker is so 2019. 2020 is Harley Quinn’s year. And in the wake of her breakup, she’s back and better than ever with a brand-new girl gang in the brilliant, breakneck “Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.” Director Cathy Yan soars with her stylish sophomore feature, which is colorful, campy and cheerfully brutal, a perfect reflection of Harley herself. Robbie, as usual, tears into the role with a wide-eyed gusto that is equally childlike and unhinged. With her Betty Boop accent, wacky wardrobe and gymnastic facility with a bat, Harley is one lovable psychopath. It’s impossible not to root for her, even as she’s reducing chemical factories to clouds of rainbow-colored smoke, gleefully dropping hordes of police officers with shotgun blasts of glitter and demolishing bad guys with roller skate high kicks to the face. Robbie makes Harley a bedeviling, beguiling antiheroine, not just any old crazy ex-girlfriend. “Birds of Prey” is also the cinematic introduction to the other birds in the flock, the beloved comic characters Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), styled as a butt-kicking blaxploitation queen, and Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a mysterious yet neurotic assassin out for vengeance. Along with renegade cop Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) and precocious pickpocket Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), this is Harley’s new girl gang. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

BLUMHOUSE’S FANTASY ISLAND

H1/2 PG-13, 110 minutes. Through today only at Waterford, Lisbon. Still playing at Stonington. Retooling the late 1970s/early 1980s ABC prime-time staple “Fantasy Island” as a sinister gotcha! outing isn’t a bad idea. That’s the wheel. The spokes are everything else, and most everything else about the new horror movie, from the Blumhouse crew and director Jeff Wadlow, is not good. Four intertwining fantasies, four stories’ worth of lame ideas, poorly executed. Call it “De-Plane Crash.” Call it “The Island of Dr. No-Thank-You.” Call it “Worstworld.” Call it surprising, to me, anyway, if it finds an audience past the first week. Just don’t call it much of a movie. Gone, of course, is the grandly gesticulating Ricardo Montalban as Mr. Roarke, though his white suit has been retailored for a subdued, somewhat indistinct Michael Pena. The mysterious resort owner’s personal assistant and general greeter is now played by a woman, Parisa Fitz-Henley, best known for the TV series “Midnight, Texas,” another, better supernatural foray, and here one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dim mashup. “Fantasy Island” toggles between the elaborate fantasies of four different sets of characters. Lucy Hale and Portia Doubleday enact a “Mean Girls” revenge scenario. Maggie Q plays a woman yearning for a husband and child, but mired in self-loathing and regret derived from a tragic accident years earlier, one with endless reverberations, as we learn. A pair of literal and figurative bros (Ryan Hansen and Jimmy O. Yang) just want to have fun, but they too must reckon with life-altering decisions. The fourth plotline anchor is hoisted by Austin Stowell, who lost his soldier father at a young age and has struggled to get right ever since. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

BRAHMS: THE BOY II

PG-13, 86 minutes. Through today only at Westbrook. Still playing at Lisbon. After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms. stars Katie Holmes, Owain Yeoman, Christopher Convery, Ralph Ineson. A review wasn’t available.

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