The film is an hour too long, the plot an hour too short, the destruction greater per square mile than World War II, and the tastelessness of its director, Michael Bay, and producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, beyond measure. To begin at the end, the film climaxes, if that's not too strong a word, with an invasion of Cuba by our two Bad Boys (Martin Lawrence and Will Smith), and a group of pals who manage not only to destroy a Havana villa but then to pile into a Hummer and get to Guantanamo Bay - a distance of more than two hundred miles - in about a minute and a half, managing to tear up half a dozen towns and villages on the way, with nothing more than a few Cuban soldiers standing in their way. Bruckheimer and Bay must have discovered that Americans have no concept of geography, much less are aware of the size of Cuba; and would assume that Guantanamo is just outside Havana. The whole sickening episode is a fitting cap to the most tasteless film since the B & B team's "Pearl Harbor."

We can see Bay and Bruckheimer telling scriptwriters Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl to give us more destruction, newer gimmicks, to take violence to a whole new level. And Shelton and Stahl have come through. There's a chase across a Biscayne Bay causeway behind a car-transport truck, with one car after another being released to flip and roll across the roadway in the path of our Bad Boys. There's another chase behind a truck carrying bodies to the morgue, with the corpses flung out on the road and one of them decapitated by the car.

The plot, if that's not too strong a word, has to do with a Cuban exile in Miami (Jordi Mollà) who's bringing in a whole lot of Ecstasy, and laundering money that he sends to Cuba, though why he would do that is a mystery in itself. He's partners for a while with the Russian Mafia and, apparently, with the Ku Klux Klan. There are cigarette boats, coffins containing the drug being dropped off of freighters, and probably a dozen other activities that I missed. One I didn't miss is that the drug is sewed into corpses at a funeral parlor, though I couldn't figure out where they were going to be delivered. Should we turn our Department of Security on to the nation's funeral directors?

At every site Bay has set up enormous gunfights, with two-fisted Mike and Marcus shooting at anything that moves, which leads to reprimands and confrontations with their captain, played by Joe Pantoliano. A bizarre and completely unbelievable plot development is that Marcus's younger sister Sydney (Gabrielle Union) is actually an undercover federal agent on the track of the drug lord herself. Naturally she's unmasked and taken hostage, and must be rescued, leading to the Cuban invasion. Please.

But there's more: One unspeakably immoral scene, to me, comes when Marcus's 15-year-old daughter is going on her first date. The boy comes to the front door to pick her up and the two partners subject him to the most humiliating and sadistic hazing ever perpetrated on screen. Was there no one with a brain, much less a heart, at the studio to say no to this? I guess not. They must have laughed themselves sick over it.