Martin Lawrence

AKA Martin Fitgerald Lawrence
Born: 16-Apr-1965
Birthplace: Frankfurt, Germany
Gender: Male

Race or Ethnicity: Black
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Comic, Actor
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Martin

Father: John Lawrence
Mother: Chlora Lawrence
Sister: Rae Proctor
Sister: Ursula Lawrence
Wife: Patricia Southall (m. 7-Jan-1995, div. 17-Sep-1996)
Daughter: Jasmine Page (b. 15-Jan-1996)
Wife: Shamicka Gibbs (b. 1975, m. 10-Jul-2010)

The official site for the next Martin Lawrence comedy, Rebound has gone live as well.

The film, opening nationwide on April 15th, stars Martin Lawrence, Patrick Warburton, Megan Mullally, Breckin Meyer, Oren Williams, Steven C. Parker, Steven Anthony Lawrence, Logan McElroy, Tara Mercurio, Eddy Martin, Tara Correa-McMullen, Gus Hoffman, Fred Stoller, Amy Bruckner and Alia Shawkat.

Martin Lawrence stars as a legendary college basketball coach who, after a public meltdown, is forced to coach a losing junior high school team. Mullally will play the principal of the junior high whose team Lawrence is coaching, while Meyer will star as the agent of Lawrence's character. Warburton will play Larry Burgess, a junior high school basketball coach who has one of the best teams in the league.

Bad Boys is an '80s buddy-cop movie dressed up in slicker, pricier '90s hyper-style. The glossy cinematic calling card for director Michael Bay and then-TV-stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, Bad Boys employs extreme-angle, color-corrected, digitally sweetened uber-cinematography (with no particular rhyme or reason to any given effect) to serve Bay's testosterone-pumped vision of quick-cut, orgiastic action. With Bay, even the dialogue scenes are shot like action scenes, and in a way, they are, the gag being that the bickering of Smith and Lawrence somehow always saves the day.

Smith plays rich-kid "player" and Miami cop Mike Lowrey, and Lawrence plays his family-man partner Marcus Burnett, a mad-sack who isn't "getting any" at home. They're narcotics cops, so the plot has something to do with their pursuit of drug dealer played (with large dollops of Euro menace) by Tchéky Karyo. Attractive good girl Julie Mott (Téa Leoni) witnesses a drug-related shooting, so their short-tempered captain (Joe Pantoliano) throws them a pointless farcical complication: the available Burnett must switch roles with the temporarily missing-in-action Lowrey to bring in the nervous witness. Since Bad Boys is sort of like Lethal Weapon 2 (why bother making a subtler first movie?), Pantoliano makes a fine Pesci substitute. The "Bad Boys" (who like to sing the infamous Cops theme song to pump up) must protect the girl and bring the bad guys down, preferably with lots of dollys, pans, zooms, helicopter shots, cranes, and slo-mo.

Both leads pull off athletic stunts and spicy banter, but the insensible and insensitive script (including a dismissal of strong women and a gratuitous Middle-Eastern Mini-mart caricature) focuses on noisy mayhem and a slew of pop culture references masquerading as one-liners. The movie has its violent ending two ways: typical of Hollywood's dumb attempts to send a message to kids that indulging violence is wrong while still allowing an audience to savor it. Bad Boys hardly skimps on the violence, pumping bullets and blowing up tanks of "extemely flammable" ether in two separate scenes (and then there's the propane...). Oh, well. Whatcha gonna do?