Bad Boys – Ride or Die review: Buddy movie’s schtick is as tired as its characters

George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was unable to catch fire on its opening weekend, and with the rest of the summer seemingly light on anything to match the marquee oomph of last year’s “Barbenheimer” double-whammy, the outlook is a summer to forget for Hollywood.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the fourth instalment in the long-running cop-buddy franchise, is unlikely to be the release that quashes the theory. And that’s before you actually sit down and watch the thing.

Landing in 1995 with a big, ­Michael Bay flex, Bad Boys hit on something. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence made for an insistent screen duo, the comic goofing of the latter against the more sincere heroism of the former. Rarely were we far from an explosion, an emptied round, or some chest-beating camaraderie.

A 2003 follow-up (with Bay once again applying the slick, swirly hero shots and deafening kablamo) did similarly brisk business. When third outing Bad Boys for Life became the fourth highest grosser of 2020, it was with the proviso that it screened in January of that year, right before the Covid pandemic shut down cinemas everywhere.

Four films across almost 30 years? Lethal Weapon did as many in 11 years. What it does allow for in Ride or Die is to let its central partnership have it both ways – to moan about doctor’s orders and gettin’ too old for this fertiliser, while also taking out the trash like a pair of sprightly enforcers.

Smith, rehabilitated from his Oscars disgrace, appears raring to go. Lawrence probably can’t believe his luck that, three decades on, he remains crucial to the brand.

The Belgian filmmaking duo known as “Adil & Bilall” (Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah) amp up the silliness of the formula – brotherly ribbing between slabs of head-popping violence that wouldn’t look out of place on the John Wick cutting-room floor. We even go to jerky, blurry first-person shooter cam in the finale, just in case the gamers had nodded off by that stage.

The tonal clash is one we were more accustomed to back when Bay’s films were doing the rounds. As if to drive home that this instalment is in thrall to a macho, discernibly 1990s nostalgia, there is even the customary strip-club scene (featuring a potty-mouthed Tiffany Haddish).​

Mike Lowrey (an ageless Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence, bloodshot but game) barely have time to celebrate Mike’s recent nuptials before a health wobble has Marcus collapsing on the dancefloor. After a bizarre hallucinatory vision, he awakes in hospital as a reborn spiritual zealot, thus providing a comedic theme to flog to death as the pair are faced with this year’s cohort of baddies.

When they are called in by police chief Secada (Paola Nuñez) and told that the late Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) has been connected to a cartel, Mike and Marcus hit the roof.

They vow to clear his name and set off on a collision course with a band of brutal mercenaries led by the vicious McGrath (pronounced in a way designed to make Irish audiences squirm). But McGrath has managed to frame the pair for a shooting and they end up on the run, simultaneously trying to evade capture and find the source of an internal leak in the Miami Police Department.

Writers Chris Bremner and Will Beall lump lots of convoluted padding and bonus jeopardy into the already busy batter. Armando (Jacob Scipio), Mike’s imprisoned son, has done his time and joins the team as a good guy.

Along with Marcus’s health scare, Mike also has become prone to debilitating panic attacks, thus threatening to dim the titular “badness” of these crime fighters when they most need it. A US Marshal is on their tail as well because something-something revenge.

Best not be too concerned about the knotty mess of plotlines. They are mere drivers for the bickering bromance and intermittent shootouts over these two hours. And for some, that “bang-bang/inane banter/bang-bang” patter will be enough to justify an evening among the reams of characters and threads this film is choked with.

For the rest of us, their schtick smacks (sorry, Will) of being as tired and infirm as the ageing buddies themselves.

Two and a half stars