Bad Boys is a troubling and often riveting drama about juvenile delinquency. Director Rick Rosenthal does a topnotch job of bringing to life the seedy, hopeless environment of a jail for juvenile offenders and has gotten some terribly convincing performances from his young cast, notably topliner Sean Penn.

Following the tradition governing such movies, the story eventually comes to a moral decision at which a bad boy has to decide whether to become a good man -- and that's too bad, because until the movie turns predictable, it is very, very good. The acting, the direction and the sense of place in Bad Boys is so strong that the movie deserves more than an obligatory right scene for its conclusion.

Bad Boys is disturbing, sometimes annoying, often painful, and never boring. Writer Richard Dilello and director Richard Rosenthal have taken a difficult subject and infused it with interesting people, some wit, and a lot of careful thought.

The violent but impressive Bad Boys doesn't waste much time getting down to business. Bad Boys is about a generation of teen-agers who have learned from television to want the biggest and the best, and it's about a generation in the process of angrily learning that it's going to be forced to settle for the littlest and the least. [22 Apr 1983]

Strictly as exploitation, Bad Boys is a pretty slick piece of work. It's overlong and short on characterization. But it's unsentimental about its teen-age hoods and unsparing about the nastiness of juvenile jails. [28 Mar 1983, p.73]