Movie review «Bad Boys: Ride or Die»

On June 6, the comedy action movie «Bad Boys: Ride or Die» starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as Miami cops. This is the fourth installment comedy action franchise «Bad Boys» and the second in a row, directed by the Belgian duo Adil & Bilal. In the review below, we tell you what kind of trouble detectives Mike Lowry and Marcus Burnett got into this time and how interesting it is to watch them get out of it heroically.

«Bad Boys: Ride or Die»

Genre comedy action movie
Directors Adil El Arbi, Bilal Falla
Starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Alexander Ludwig, Vanessa Ann Hudgens, Eric Dane, Ioan Griffiths, Joe Pantoliano
Premiere movie theaters
Year of issue 2024
Website IMDb

The day has come! Marcus Burnett, a model family man, had finally waited for the moment when his staunch bachelor and partner Mike Lowry had come to his senses and decided to get married. However, dancing hard at the wedding cost Marcus a heart attack and a subsequent brief «meeting» with the deceased Captain Conrad Howard in a bizarre afterlife. And it happened for a reason, as the latter is accused of corruption and links to drug cartels.

Not wanting to believe in such nonsense, Mike and Marcus undertake to clear the good name of their former boss, but soon become victims of the cunning manipulations of a mysterious enemy. As a result, they find themselves on the wrong side of the law and turn into fugitives (not very skillful ones, by the way). In the best traditions of Dominic Toretto, the unlucky heroes can only trust those who will be invited to a festive barbecue in the event of a sunny happy ending.«Bad Boys» have always been famous for their easy, and sometimes even outrageous, goofiness, which has become their well-recognized to trademark. However, where Michael Bay did not always see the shore, the Belgian duo Adil & Bilal seems to have managed to find, if not the perfect, then at least an acceptable proportion of lighthearted idiocy and incendiary action. Apt jokes and simultaneous shots at impudent bandits.

The scene in the gallery, where, in the midst of a fierce gunfight, Martin Lawrence’s character seizes the moment. In a fitting slam dunk, he greedily grabs the candy and drink that are scattered by the shot and spills out of the broken container, is indicative of this. It would seem that the tension here should be maximum, as if you could die from a bullet, but successful comedy defuses the situation. This is a great local example of how to combine action and humor. Also, this episode brings to mind the frantic Harley Quinn from «Birds of Prey», when cocaine dust literally falls on her during a fight.Let’s take another example. Burnett, inspired by a trip to the afterlife, changes his behavior, and even as if he were actually actively using psychotropic substances. And this already looks like a not very successful comedy technique because the character is more annoying with his crude caricature than funny.

In general, this is how the whole movie can be characterized: some moments seem successful and appropriate, while others could have been eliminated in the editing room. For example, when Will Smith gets slapped instead of out of old habit It’s funny to hand them out. When the camera dynamically switches from a full-face shot of the heroes to a first-person shooter shot and vice versa, it’s spectacular. And when a grenade flies right at them, but after the explosion, the guys don’t have a scratch on them, it’s at least strange. Or the alligator that migrated here from somewhere in the «Road House», still seems to be a dubious character.

If in the infinite «Fast & Furious» or in «Mission Impossible» the filmmakers of «Bad Boys» try to surprise us with new, bigger and wilder scenes and stunts every time, but they do almost everything the same as last time. But they do it well, so this is exactly the case when such obvious predictability is to their advantage.