This big time early eighties release has been all but forgotten until it started showing up on cable a few times recently.Sean Pean was still too young to be a political agitator, and he was desperate to shed his Jeff Spicoli image with this tough youth prison flick. He does a good job as O'Brien, who winds up behind bars after killing someone during his juvenile crime spree. He rises up the ranks of the prison hierarchy until Esai Morales, the brother of the boy he killed, winds up in the same jail looking for revenge. It's an old time prison movie right down to the wailing siren you hear during a daylight escape. In addition to Penn and Santoni, you'll also see a youthful Clancy Brown perfecting his on screen villainy as a brutal con.This movie was kind of a big deal in our area when it was filmed. I lived near where they shot most of it, and I remember the newspaper put out a casting call for local kids to try out for bit parts in the movie.

The reason being my father was in this movie right when he was out of high school, still living in Chicago. Right around 9 minutes in during the scene where all the "students" are standing outside the "high school", he was standing there with his group of friends at the time almost dead center of the camera in the dark blue and white checkered shirt. It's fascinating to me because I never knew my dad during this time since this movie was filmed 3 years before I was born. He had hair and was incredibly thin, which of course 30 years later much has changed. I believe he told me the school or building (can't even remember if that building WAS a school because I don't think the interior that was filmed was the same building) was in a very dangerous neighborhood and they were told not to be there after dark. So they could only be around during the day while filming and he got lucky and became an extra. This was the entire reason I knew of this film nearly 20 years after it's creation and watched it and loved it. It's an awesome film even though you can clearly tell it was from the 80's (Similar to watching something like The Warriors) it sends a message that is timeless and still relevant to this day. It's incredibly powerful and still one of my favorite movies and since Sean Penn is an incredible actor, it's great to see him at such a young age before his career had really taken off. Definitely give this movie a watch, it starts out kind of slow in my opinion but once it gets to the meat of the film where the rest of it takes place, it's a wild ride.

Bad Boys is directed by Rick Rosenthal and written by Richard Di Lello. It stars Sean Penn, Esai Morales, Eric Gurry, Alan Ruck, Ally Sheedy and Clancy Brown. Music is by Bill Conti and cinematography by Bruce Surtees and Donald E. Thorin.Mick O'Brien (Penn), a teenage criminal from Chicago, finds himself doing hard time at the Rainford Juvenile Correction Facility after his latest robbery attempt ends in tragedy. Rainford is not a place where young thugs get reformed, it's where they become harder and more prepared for a life of crime........ Teenage hoodlum movies are notoriously difficult to get right, more often than not, in spite of being riveting viewing experiences, they come off as being exploitive rather than educationally observant. Over the years there have been one or two exceptions, leading the way was Scum (1979), Alan Clarke's scorching appraisal of the British Borstal system, and from America, Rick Rosenthal's Scum influenced Bad Boys starring a pre-fame Sean Penn. Bad Boys is a rare old beast in the pantheon of young offender movies, it manages to overcome inevitability and primitiveness of plot by giving thought to its central characters, notably Penn's wounded animal protagonist., who remarkably isn't a perfunctory part of the plot. Sense of place, too, is given much attention to detail as Rosenthal gets in tight within the confines of this juvenile facility. Di Lello's script is thankfully free of the clichés that often detract from the drama in a prison based movie, the moral choice heartbeat that pounds away in Bad Boys is never twee or shoehorned in by way of a necessity. The thematics exist on very real humanistic terms. Led by a spitfire turn from Penn, cast are mostly great, with Gurry (engaging), Sheedy (tender), Morales (complex) and Brown (menacing) adding a professionalism not often seen in films of this type.Problems arise when the film goes outside of Rainford's fences, for it loses some pent up momentum. What made Scum so searing and oppressive was that it never left the Borstal facility, claustrophobia and anger inherent were the order of the day. Bad Boys' makers choose to weld two concurrent stories on the outside, with that of Mick O'Brien's fate, it works in respect of the narrative outcome (which with some annoyance is never in any doubt), but at some cost to the mood created in the bleak interiors. There's also the issues of having to accept the ridiculousness of certain developments in the story. Be it the easy access to substances no real life prisoner would be allowed near, or the leap of faith needed to imagine that the prison authorities would allow the final confrontation to become a reality, we are asked to look the other way in order to get some hefty wallop into the drama.Violent and unflinching in its emotional honesty, and supremely crafted on both sides of the camera, Bad Boys, one or two hiccups aside, is a first rate drama. 8/10

When people think of "Bad Boys" the first thing that comes to mind is most likely the Michael Bay epic staring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. That is not the case in this review. "Bad Boys" is the story of Sean Penn's character Mick O'Brian and a chunk of his life in which he goes to juvenile hall. Your generic bad neighborhood is where Mick O'Brian lives, ruled by gangs and over run with crime. A place where just by sitting at a red light you can be mugged, and for helping be bashed on the head with a pipe. Sean Penn, only twenty-three years old at the time this movie was made was a very dedicated actor. One scene in particular was he and a new inmate enters the detention hall for the first time. It is fairly obvious that whenever a new batch of boys enters the hall the custom is to spit and throw objects at them to reassure the new boys that they are new. Penn asked his fellow cast members to give it all they got and spit as much as they could on him. Further more Penn and other cast members performed whatever stunts their characters needed to do. It isn't long that O'Brian cannot take any more of the regime in place and the torture the boys in charge inflict on a weaker inmate. Soon enough O'Brian becomes the leader of the guys in the detention hall. Once he takes charge however Penn keeps his acting relatively the same despite O'Brian as a character is now in charge and becomes moderately power hungry, Penn does a wonderful job at keeping it in. In the whole though, this film doesn't really seem to go anywhere, but has the possibility to keep people entertained for the duration of the film.