Danny Glover was only 40 when cameras rolled on Lethal Weapon, the platonic ideal of bickering buddy-cop flicks, in which he played a straight-arrow, family-man detective facing dual crucibles: his 50th birthday (the makeup department grayed his hair) and being partnered with a reckless, possibly suicidal, younger cop.
Will Smith, 55, and Martin Lawrence, 59, the bickering buddy cops of the Bad Boys series, have each left the half-century mark behind. Smith’s Clinton-era tentpoles, Independence Day and Men in Black, have spawned (dire) sequels without him. But Bad Boys abides, carrying on the legacy of the Lethal Weapon-iad by foregrounding its romance between two straight men against the backdrop of run-and-gun, copaganda fantasy.
Despite the intercession of a global pandemic that made the prior entry, January 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, the biggest box office hit of the year, the interval between that installment and this fourth one is still by far the shortest gap between sequels in a series that began in 1995. That’s so long ago that Lawrence was the top-billed star of the original! So long ago that 2003’s abysmal Bad Boys II opened with our heroes busting a KKK rally with the battle cry, “Blue Power!” That hit differently two decades ago. (Though seeing Henry Rollins play a SWAT commander was just as weird then as it would be now.) And speaking of hitting, the new Bad Boys: Ride or Die—the first Smith vehicle to arrive in theaters since he smacked Chris Rock onstage at the 2022 Academy Awards—addresses that not-at-all funny incident in a way that is, well, pretty funny.
Because Bad Boys—as a relic of the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer era (with the homophobic jokes, in earlier installments, to prove it)—had to reinvent itself for the Marvel Age of cinema. There’s more narrative connective tissue between this installment and the previous one than in any of the earlier movies. Jacob Scipio’s Armando, the secret offspring of Smith’s Mike Lowrey who spent the prior film trying to murder his old man, is back, as are the group of younger, tech-savvier, and improbably hot cops played by Paola Núñez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Alexander Ludwig. The one who didn’t report for duty this time around is Charles Melton, who seems to be moving up in the world with his celebrated supporting turn in November’s May December.
Because the new film requires you to recall this, I shall dutifully reiterate that Bad Boys for Life killed off their boss, Joe Pantoliano’s Captain Howard, a classic second-sequel move. (See also Skyfall, Daniel Craig’s 003rd 007 flick. And like Spectre, the fourth entry in that series, Bad Boys for Life brings back the slain leader in the form of a posthumous video message and a hallucination.) The new additions are Rhea Seehorn as Howard’s daughter, a revenge-obsessed U.S. Marshal, and Eric Dane as the film’s generically menacing heavy.
A conspiracy to frame, posthumously, their beloved Pepto Bismol-chugging Captain—and then the Smith and Lawrence characters themselves—drives the extremely loose plot of Bad Boys: Ride of Die. Shaggy even at an anachronistically brief 115 minutes, it still finds time to have Smith’s eternal playboy get married and for Lawrence’s Marcus Burnett to suffer a heart attack and recover instantly. (As is so often the case in this genre, Melanie Liburd, who plays Mike’s spouse, is given nothing to do other than to be taken hostage in the third act. Meanwhile, Theresa Randle, who played Theresa Burnett in the prior movies, has been recast by Tasha Smith, no relation.)
Besides half-heartedly serving its cops-on-the-run plot, Ride or Die is also a legasequel in the vein of Creed, Top Gun: Maverick, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and so many others. Unlike those movies, it doesn’t really play up the generation gap among its heroes, or reckon with the passage of time in any substantial way. The writing committee used up all their hair dye and Viagra jokes in the prior movie, I guess. And Smith and Lawrence make no attempt to keep up with contemporaries Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves in the screen athletics department, tending to let the frenetic camerawork do the running for them.
Aiding and abetting them in this effort is the returning direction team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. These two Belgians were children when Bad Boys ’95 came out, but they once again attempt their own shock-and-awe variation on the already-chaotic visual grammar of Michael Bay (who directed the first two installments before moving on to the even dumber, louder pastures of the Transformers flicks), including a few knowing reprisals of Bay’s signature low-angle, slow-motion pans around their stars. This involves a lot of drone shots, and some first-person-shooter POV stuff that I find particularly distasteful. It’s a reminder that Bay’s bombastic style has been displaced in the past decade or so by the “gun-fu” that stuntpeople turned directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch pioneered with John Wick. Much as I’ve enjoyed those films, I hate that they’ve had the effect of turning seemingly every action movie character into a hyper-efficient mass shooter.
That trend is on display throughout Ride or Die, but never more than in a bizarre scene in which Lowry and Burnett hack into Burnett’s home surveillance network so they can watch on TV while Burnett’s Marine son-in-law Reggie—played by Dennis Greene, whose appearances in the Bad Boys films circa 2003–2014 comprise the entirety of his filmography—mows down roughly a dozen attackers who’ve been sent to kill Burnett’s family. I much preferred the finale, set at “an abandoned theme park,” someone says, wherein several bad guys get eaten by a nine-foot albino alligator named Duke. Who says a 29-year-old specimen of late-20th-century copaganda can’t still surprise us?
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (R, 115 minutes) opened in area theaters June 7.