Bad Boys, Michael Bay’s first film, was a statement of intent – an argument for Bay as the inheritor to the traditions of Tony Scott and Michael Mann. It draws on the Miami of Miami Vice and Manhunter as the cutting-edge of 80s hyperreality, and then hyperbolises it further to produce the origin’s of Bay’s trademark post-continuous style. Before we meet any of the main players in the film, we’re introduced first and foremost to Miami as a confounding of land and sea, liquid and solid, keys of dope and keys of land, in which regular space and time are continually on the verge of dissolving into a more ecstatic and ambient ether. Police officers Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Miles Burnett (Martin Lawrence) act as our guides to this strange new world, by way of a crime narrative that sees a huge quantity of heroin stolen from Miami Police lockup. In reality, though, the plot of Bad Boys is largely incidental, operating mainly as a vehicle for Bay to take the hallucinatory postmodern style of the 80s, and the sentimental hypermasculinities of Scott and Mann, to an even more radical extreme.

Right from the outset, Mike and Miles feel more like exaggerated simulacra of black men than naturalistic figures in themselves. We meet Mike proudly announcing that “I get up early and I take it to the max every day” before observing that he needs sex every morning to function properly as a cop, especially one with a token ball-busting female manager. At their first crime scene, Mike and Miles get into a bickery argument about the word “cajones,” working themselves up into a slick patina of sweat that seems to cover every other surface in the film as well, including the lens of the camera, which is itself continually flexing, working out its muscles through one extravagant cut and kinetic shot after another. As in Scott and Mann, you feel that cinematic manhood has a greater number of poses and postures to chop and change than ever before, and yet this also produces a kind of hypermasculine melancholy, a mournful suspicion that maleness itself might be little more than a simulation. Accordingly, the testosterone-soaked aggression is offset by a plaintive ambience, a longing for the real, that spills out into the ultra-produced Spanish guitar soundtrack, wrapped in waves of synth.

With Mike and Miles leading the way, Bay takes us through a lifeworld that alternates vertiginously between ultra-porous and ultra-flattened spaces. At times every single location in the film feels connected and networked, whether it’s a drug lab that fails because it’s too suffused with the inescapable moisture of South Florida, or an arcane crime scene backed by blowing curtains in a direct nod to Scott. Bay’s indebtedness to Scott is also clear in the flattened spaces, which take the horizon glows of Top Gun, Days of Thunder and Revenge, and uses them to divest the backdrop of any sense of depth whatsoever, most memorably in a scene that sees Mike and Miles cruising down a highway while an enormous cruise ship enters the Port of Miami directly behind them. With space either dispersed or flattened, the hyper-masculine affect of the film is thrown into even more hallucinatory relief, evoking a new world in which feelings, sensations and perceptions have slipped their traditional bodily boundaries.

Against that backdrop, Bad Boys is most memorable when Mike and Miles, and Smith and Lawrence, simply relish their flow, freestyling through Miami and riding the wave of this new image sphere above and beyond the demands of the narrative. Both actors are brilliant at befuddlement, double takes, and being lost for words, and they beautifully capture both the disorientation and exhilaration of the male body as it engages with the digital humidity that cloaks and chokes more and more of the film’s spaces. And this flow paves the way for the real narrative hook of Bad Boys, its true narrative genius – an identity swap in which Mike and Miles find themselves pretending to be each other for the sake of witness Julie Mott (Tea Leoni). Cosplaying each others’ lives allows them to sink even deeper into their shared libidinal flow, as Mike, the ladies’ man, shacks up with Miles’ wife, and Miles, the homemaker, moves in with Julie to Mike’s bachelor pad. A delirious and escalating feedback loop now ensues between the family man and the hustler, the alpha and the cuck, the player and the “respectable” middle-class citizen, as the two dominant archetypes of black onscreen masculinity commingle to fuse blaxploitation with Hollywood, while transcending both. In this collapsing and confounding of black masculinities lies Bad Boys’ vision of a new hyper-masculinity, attuned to the hyperreality of its Miami spaces – a form of manhood that doesn’t elude simulacra but instead recombines them in ever more ingeniously comic configurations.

This, in turn, produces a surfeit of free-floating jouissance that infuses every interaction indiscriminately, collapsing and confounding the hierarchies of affect that constitute Hollywood “realism.” Here, being a husband and father – the purveyor of a “baby factory” – can be every bit as libidinal as being a hustler, while even the distinction between heterosexual and homoerotic attachment starts to break down, albeit not in the spirit of a “serious” exercise in representation but as part of an indiscriminate hyper-masculine energy. The result is a kind of explicitly unconscious homoeroticism, from a shot that features a Greek nude sculpture in the foreground while Miles’ exclaims “maggots!” in the background, the rhyming accusation being left to echo unspoken across the scene; to Julie’s initial assumption that Mike and Miles are lovers, due to the fact that Miles has apparently dotted “his” apartment with photographs of Mike in one strikingly handsome pose after another; to the comic relief of a convenience store owner who mistakenly thinks Miles and Mike are planning to rob him, and so pulls out a gun while threatening “I blow you! Then I blow you!” As these comic misrecognitions escalate, Leoni proves to be the perfect foil for and mediator between the two male leads, and Bad Boys shines when this triangular rapport approaches a sitcom: two guys and a girl shacked up in a single apartment, with wonderful chemistry to riff upon.

That sitcom element is just one ingredient in the film’s multifaceted palette, however, and is eventually absorbed into the first great action sequence of Bay’s career. This is prefigured by a hyper-kinetic chase scene that takes us through a series of pointedly post-continuous spaces (a fashion shoot in a white canvas of a studio, a group of older women getting their hair done, a squad of wheelchair basketball players) as well as by a sequence in which Mike recruits an imprisoned hactivist to jack into the criminals’ mobile phone, thereby collapsing real and virtual space. It feels almost inevitable that the showdown takes place on the deterretorialised and supersonic space of the Miami-Dade International Airport tarmac, where the last residues of realism collapse into a miasma of smoke, fire and machinery. As the explosions send a sea of bank notes flying through the volatile air, each individual greenback on fire, Bay seems to have finally discovered his muse: the delirious space of flows of 90s capital, inflected through, and intensified by comparison with, the rigid structures of the American military-industrial complex, figured here as conflation of plane and automobile.

Accordingly, this space of flows splits the difference between airborne and grounded action. The first climax of the showdown comes when the criminals’ plane explodes in its hangar, like an air disaster that happens on solid ground, before the mastermind, Fouchet, played by Tcheky Karyo, escapes by driving a vintage car directly out of the hold of the plane moments before the conflagration and galvanises a supersonic car chase that segues into the slipstream of a plane taking off further down the runway. Now we’re grounded, but the affect is closer to flight, as Fouchet, along with Mike, Miles and Julie in the car behind him, both race to get through a hole in the jet blast barrier that will only accommodate one car. Bay’s close-ups become extreme now, as everything apart from this hyper-kineticism dissolves into a post-spatial, post-temporal world that ends by depositing us at this jet blast threshold, the camera pulling up to aerial shots that promise to launch us into an entirely new post-cinematic universe as Mike and Miles declare their love for each other. If Top Gun envisaged a new masculine filmic flow expansive enough to encompass the disavowed homoeroticism of the classic action film, then Bad Boys is the next step along that route – a manifesto for a post-cinematic masculinity in which manhood is so discontinuous, chaotic and jagged that it produces a proportionate adrenalin, strong enough to cruise through even the queerest love.