Bad Boys: Ride or Die – Review
Since “the slap heard ’round the world” at the Oscars, Will Smith has released 1 movie: Emancipation, which in any other year would have been somewhat bigger than it turned out to be.
Not for nothing, then, he returns to safer ground with the fourth film in the venerable Bad Boys franchise: Ride or Die.
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
115 Minutes, Rated R
Written by Chris Bremner, Will Beall, and Geoge Gallo
Directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah
Synopsis:
When their former captain is implicated in corruption, two Miami police officers have to work to clear his name.
To be clear, it’s probably the only way he could keep working otherwise.
To be honest, I’ve only seen the original film in this series. It just didn’t appeal to me much. I got my fill of buddy-cop-comedies as the once-great Lethal Weapon films dragged on too long, and I never counted myself a huge Martin Lawrence fan in the first place.
He can be a bit… much… sometimes.
Regardless, I vowed to give this one a shot because, well, people have loved it in the past, just as people have loved the Fast and Furious films as they’ve grown more and more patently ridiculous.
he audience is there, and I figured that whatever else one might think, the audience will likely be there for this franchise, as well.
That said, my bar was pretty low.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die, as it turns out cleared it easily.
Slow your roll, people; it was a low bar, remember? This film isn’t the second coming of anything.
But it’s not without its charms. The action sequences are very intense and (generally) well-shot. Much like Miami Vice, however, I still have no idea how a cop can afford the stuff these guys do, but whatever. Suspension of Disbelief, am I right?
As our titular Bad Boys try to track down the person or persons responsible for framing their dead Captain (Joe Pantoliano), they find themselves squarely in the middle of an increasing amount of tried and true plot tropes, from cartels, to Mike Lowery’s (Will Smith) bastard son, responsible for the death of said Captain (and now serving prison time courtesy of his father), to “who can you trust?” moments, and an absolutely insane supernatural subplot concerning Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence), who has a near-death experience early in the film and spends the rest of the movie dispensing advice from the afterlife (“Advice from the Afterlife” sounds like a podcast…) that is as silly as it is vague most of the time.
Reaching the classic “the villain has their family trope, the boys gather the only folks they know they can trust (including Mike’s son, busted out of prison to further frame him) and form a rag-tag squad to save the day.
Culminating in a fantastic — and fantastical — final gunfight at a deserted reptile park (where “Duke,” a huge albino gator still roams… foreshadowing), the audience is treated to simultaneously best and worst cinematography separated by mere seconds of screen-time.
Some incredible drone footage in the park building sweeps across the screen, around the room and even up some open spiral stairs is simply gorgeous, but it’s interspersed with some positively clunky FPS POV shots, couple with what would be chest-mounted selfie angles of the guys.
Terrible. Horrible. No good. Those shots should be stricken from the cinematography playbook.
*shudder*
In the end, all is right with the world, as it must in a film like this, and the audience is left feeling, if not good, then exhausted by the process.
I was, but it was damn-near to being a good exhaustion.
So there’s that.
So was it Ride? or Die?
For me, it was probably “or.”
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is in theaters now and stars Martin Lawrence, Will Smith, Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Paola Nunez, Eric Dane, Ioan Gruffudd, Jacob Scipio, Melanie Liburd, Tasha Smith, and Joe Pantoliano.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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