PREMISE
Miami’s favorite Bad Boys find themselves on the run while trying to clear their former captain’s name.
THE GOOD STUFF
SMITH & LAWRENCE- Obviously. The strength of this franchise was never about the action even though the action was great. It was never about Michael Bay even though he was fantastic when he was around. This franchise has always been about the coolest uncles at the barbecue comedic dynamism between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.
I’ve argued this for years and years and I may argue until my dying day… There are no two actors in the business over the last 30 years that have MORE on-screen chemistry than Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. There are some that have just as much (Pitt & Clooney, Rock & Hart) but not more. Challenge me on that if you dare.
In this movie, Lawrence carries the entire first act. The angle that is taken with his character allows him to be goofier than he normally has been all the while holding down the action sequences as he’s always done. Smith has always been the conquering action hero in this franchise and in the second half of the movie, that hero stuff takes over, and…well, he’s still Will Smith at the end of the day. This action thing is completely in his wheelhouse as we all know. Mike Lowry is older, and he moves a little bit slower, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still a complete badass.
THE (GOOD) ACTION STUFF- Respectfully speaking, this is very much the Coke Zero version of Michael Bay-type action stuff. These last two bad boys movies have been flat-out tributes to Bay in many different ways when it comes to how the action is presented. Drones fly everywhere to get a complete shot of a room during a shootout, the car chases look exactly the same as something Bay would do minus excessive explosions, and there’s even the Michael Bay spinning camera hero shot. (Which got a very loud cheer from the audience when it happened) it’s all stuff that we’ve seen before from Bay, and it’s quite a testament to the man that the Coke Zero version of what he does is still better than 90% of the action stuff that’s out there.
REGGIE- Can’t spoil anything. What I will say about Reggie is that he has had more character development being off-screen than any character in any franchise that I can think of.
THE BAD STUFF
THE (BAD) ACTION STUFF- The one thing we all took for granted with Michael Bay was excessiveness. For decades we lambasted the man because he just couldn’t help himself in making his action as cartoonish as humanly possible. Him jam-packing the action damn in near all of his movies made a lot of them close to two and a half hours in length. Fast forward to the current day, 30 years after the original Bad boys movie came out, and it’s very clear that there just isn’t… Enough action in this movie.
There are more short and sweet action scenes that may last two or three minutes total than excessively loud and chaotic ones like we’re used to having when it comes to this franchise. There are a couple of instances in this movie where after the action sequence ends I would think to myself… “Bay would have done that one better. Quite a few action sequences honestly.
ARMANDO- I really don’t like this character. Jacob Scipio definitely holds his own when it comes to action stuff I’ll give him that. However, his performances in the last two movies have been very… Eastwood-ish. And I’m not talking about like the emotional Clint Eastwood stuff like in million Dollar baby and Bridges of Madison county and Gran Torino, no sir. What he does here is reminiscent of those Spaghetti Western days of Eastwood. He plays this role very monotone and with maybe three total facial expressions.
He made an excellent villain in the last one, but when you try and flip the script and make him protagonistic, boy does it not go well.
THE UGLY STUFF
THE “TWIST”- Of course, I’m not here to spoil anything, what I will say is that this has one of the most obvious plot twists in the history of ever. You would have to have never seen an action film in your entire life to not guess what this twist is by the 45-minute mark of this damn near 2-hour movie. I’ll just leave it at that.
SO. MANY. CHARACTERS.- This movie is 115 minutes. I’m not saying that’s a short run time or anything like that when you have SO MANY CHARACTERS getting screen time, you just kinda wonder if we needed like 25 more minutes to not make them seen so ancillary. So many characters.
Let’s see here, there’s Mike and Marcus & their families, the former crew from the previous Bad boys for life which was Alexander Ludwig, Vanessa Hudgens, and Paola Nunez, there are multiple cameos that don’t need to be here, multiple villains with no backstory, Joey Pants is back for a scene or two, and there’s also a major character played by Rhea Seehorn of all people. Seehorn is an absolutely f****** incredible actress who’s been robbed of at least two Emmys, and her talents are absolutely wasted here.
Because we’re trying to fit this into less than a 2-hour running time, we get a lot of quick roundups of important plot elements just to keep this story on its wildly inconsistent pace.
**************
In watching these last two BAD BOYS movies what becomes very obvious to me is how the first two movies really represented where action movies were at the time of their releases. Bad boys is very much a ’90s action movie, and Bad boys 2 is very much a 2000s-kind of an action movie. These last two movies are in no position to represent where the action genre is now (because everything is based around CGI these days) but they are there to just be popcorn movies. And that shouldn’t bother anybody. That being said…
Is this movie as good as the first two iterations of this franchise? Absolutely the f*** not. Is this movie as good as the last one? Absolutely.
It’s just as funny, keeps the franchise fresh in a couple of ways, finds new stuff for Mike and Marcus to get into, and ultimately justifies at least one more round from this franchise. But maybe just one.
BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE is in theaters now
