Summary
What are we going to do when they come for us? Pretty much the same thing we’ve been doing for the last three decades. A nostalgic, action-packed sequel blending humor, chaos, and genre staples.
It’s been a slightly unbelievable 29 years since the first Bad Boys hit the screen, solidifying a brand of Bayhem that Hollywood has imitated and escalated ever since. From the opening shots of a large ‘Miami’ sign to the constant callbacks, directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (known collectively as Adil & Bilall) follow Bad Boys for Life (2020) with a frenetic nostalgiafest.
Following the marriage of Detective Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) to his hitherto unseen beau Christine (Melanie Liburd), long-time professional partner Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) suffers a nonfatal heart attack. In the aftermath, he has a new lease on life in the midst of Lowrey’s sudden onset of panic attacks. It’s an old-fashioned role reversal!
Spending more time on comedic sequences of Marcus ‘finding himself’ than on giving Christine any backstory or character development whatsoever, both of these things are forgotten when the late Captain Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano) is posthumously framed as a corrupt cop. Determined to prove him innocent, the duo become fugitives when they are forced to team-up with Marcus’ imprisoned son Armando Aretas (Jacob Scipio).
Modern franchise action dictates that by the time you reach the fourth film in a series, you either go for ridiculous amounts of escalation (Fast and the Furious) or embrace age and nostalgia (Lethal Weapon). BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE goes for a little from each column.
While it is getting harder and harder to gel with the endless glorification of balletic gunplay as entertainment, Adil & Bilall bring all their style to bear on these sequences. Most set-pieces are impressively staged: art and bullets literally collide in one scene, there’s a helicopter fight/crash and a chase in a flaming van. Still, there’s other points where a first-person shooter sequence crosses the line fully into gaming, possibly indicative of the intended audience. (We can only wonder what they brought to the studio-buried Batgirl).
Yet Chris Bremner and Will Beall’s screenplay ultimately leans hard into the late middle age of its leads, filling in the gaps between gunfire with quippy one-liners and grizzled resignation. The rest is filled with cameos and bit-parts, from DJ Khaled and Tiffany Haddish to a criminally underused Vanessa Hudgens.
So, if Bad Boys for Life left us with the promise of a boldly expanded concept, BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE mostly squanders that by retreating back into its own house style. Nevertheless, it remains the most entertaining and efficient way to work your way through the plots of every 80s and 90s action film in under two hours.
2024 | USA | DIRECTOR: Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah | WRITERS: Chris Bremner and Will Beall | CAST: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Paola Núñez, Eric Dane, Ioan Gruffudd, Rhea Seehorn, Jacob Scipio, Melanie Liburd, Tasha Smith, Tiffany Haddish, Joe Pantoliano | DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing | RUNNING TIME: 115 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 23 May 2024 (Australia), 7 June 2024 (USA)
