As ancient prophecy foretold, the “Fast & Furious”-ification of the “Bad Boys” franchise is made complete with its fourth installment, which builds on the sordid plot twists of 2020’s “Bad Boys for Life”: an undercover affair! A secret cartel love child who murders Joe Pantoliano! DJ Khaled! This trigger-happy soap opera spins a breakneck and broadly entertaining summer blockbuster about the holy trinity of American traditions: family, corruption, and shooting people. This one even ends with a barbecue.
Vin Diesel’s Wagnerian car saga ran out of gas a long time ago, but the story engine that powered it from the streets to the stratosphere has proven a solid fit for this sunbaked nostalgia act, a ’90s-era property straining to stay relevant in a sick, sad world where Deadpool is a bigger draw than Michael Bay, and Will Smith is less famous for his hits than his slaps. It used to be that an iconic reggae song and two bonafide movie stars were enough to hold a franchise together — now you need a mythology. It used to be that spectacle was enough to drive crowds to the multiplex — now you need the sunken-cost fallacy. People have to feel obligated to buy a ticket on opening weekend.
So here we go again, with Detective Lieutenants Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) returning for a sequel that doubles down on the previous movie’s efforts to spin a simple cops-and-robbers series into something bigger. Something that protects itself against the future while simultaneously consecrating its own past. Remember the funny scene in “Bad Boys II” when a nice kid named Reggie showed up to take Marcus’ daughter on a date, only for our cop heroes to wave a gun in his face? If “Bad Boys for Life” turned that bit into a running gag, “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” bends over backward to codify it as a piece of cultural history.
And you know what? It basically works. It works because Reggie actor Dennis Greene, who to this day has never acted in anything outside of the “Bad Boys” franchise, is a comic savant whose slab-faced deadpan makes him the perfect foil for Smith and Lawrence’s shouty banter. It works because the movie around these actors strikes the right balance between silliness and sincerity, even if only by virtue of being sillier and more sincere than any of the previous installments. And it works because directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (billed as Adil & Bilall) continue to honor the series’ roots — planted by returning superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer — even as the script threatens to pull further away from them.
Of course, some things never change. Marcus may have spent the last movie threatening to retire, but “Ride or Die” naturally begins with the Bad Boys doing what they do best: violating every conceivable Miami traffic law with complete impunity, as if “Grand Theft Auto” were a training simulation instead of an anarchic fantasy. They’re late for Mike’s wedding, where the lifelong fuckboy — chastened by the still-recent discovery that he’s the father and sole living relative of a cartel assassin named Armando (Jacob Scipio) — is scheduled to tie the knot with a physical trainer he met between movies. Her name is Christine; she’s played by the wonderful “Alan Wake II” actress Melanie Liburd, and her character here is so transparently a human prop that she’s half-obscured at the altar by a giant portrait of Mike’s slain ex-boss, Captain Conrad Howard. (In fairness, who among us doesn’t wish they got married next to a framed photograph of character actor Joe Pantoliano?)
Weird or not, the wedding is a perfect venue to gather virtually all the characters who will matter to this story. Characters like Mike’s boss and ex-girlfriend Rita Secada (Paola Núñez), who killed his baby mama at the end of the last movie and is now dating high-powered mayoral candidate Lockwood (Horatio Hornblower himself, Ioan Gruffudd), a crusty suit of a politician who couldn’t scream “potential bad guy!” any louder if he delivered every line of dialogue directly into Immortan Joe’s loudspeaker system. There’s also Captain Howard’s embittered daughter (a wasted Rhea Seehorn), a U.S. Marshall so furious about her father’s murder that she’s liable to make wildly illogical assumptions about who was behind it, even if those assumptions make Mike and Miles into wanted fugitives. The same Mike who loved her dad so much that his wedding ceremony took place at an altar to him! We also meet her daughter Callie (Quinn Hemphill) because a “Bad Boys” movie can never have enough female characters to be taken hostage in the third act.
And yet, for all of the new and familiar faces at Mike’s wedding, it’s his old buddy Marcus who ends up stealing the spotlight, as he suffers a massive — but comically artful — heart attack in the middle of the dance floor. It’s not all bad news: The potential widowmaker allows Mike’s soul to visit the beach from “Contact” and meet up with Pantoliano’s Force ghost before he jolts back to life a few days later, convinced that the universe won’t let him die until it’s “his time.” (Pantoliano also appears in a series of video diaries the Captain recorded before his death, including the adorable one in which he refers to Mike and Marcus as “my bad boys” in the same tone Bob Odenkirk once referred to the March sisters as his little women.) Lawrence even has his own little “Fearless” moment as he walks along the edge of the hospital roof with his ass hanging out, which is par for the course in a movie that nods back to the ’90s whenever it can.
Needless to say, that feeling of invincibility is a dangerous thing for a cop to have when he’s chasing after heavily armed criminals. And it will pave the way for Marcus to get up to all sorts of frantic shenanigans — and 1,000 different jokes about how Mike was his pet donkey in a past life — as he and Mike try to hunt down the sociopathic ex-Army Ranger (Eric Dane) who’s framed their late Captain as a double agent for the cartels. It’s a hunt that will force the Boys to spring Mike’s estranged son from the maximum-security prison he’s still in for the Captain’s murder.
It would be an understatement to say that Will Beal and Chris Bremner’s script requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but Adil & Bilall are convinced they can sustain a certain amount of nonsense with centrifugal force alone if they just keep the plot’s wheels spinning fast enough, and they’re not wrong about that. At 115 minutes (with credits), “Ride or Die” is only a hair shorter than the next-leanest film in its franchise, but it moves at a speed these characters have never seen before, the action screeching from one setpiece to another as if edited to match the way that Mike drives.
Encouraged by the easy, timeless, and still-enjoyable rapport between Smith and Lawrence, that manic pacing is the best explanation this movie offers for Mike’s frequent panic attacks. It’s a cheap way of indicating a new level of concern for the people in his life, and an even cheaper setup for the closest thing “Ride or Die” offers to a meta-joke about Smith’s infamous night at the Oscars. It’s also the only excuse this movie needs to race through Tiffany Haddish’s cameo as a stripper with an entire arsenal in her g-string, reintroduce DJ Khaled as the face of the franchise’s criminal underworld, and completely ignore the fact that Charles Melton’s “Rafe” is MIA (his AMMO comrades Vanessa Hudgens and Alexander Ludwig suddenly materialize in the movie’s second hour as if they’ve been there all along, though it’s good to have them back). At one point, the script gestures toward making a direct connection with “Bad Boys II,” but even that falls by the wayside as Mike and Marcus find themselves on the run.
The film’s relentless pacing is perhaps best exemplified by its frenetic action sequences, each shot like the final match from “Challengers.” Adil & Bilall move the camera so much that they make Michael Bay feel like a landscape painter by comparison, bouncing around the actors like a computer-guided tennis ball in the hopes that it might save them from the hassle of staging decent fight choreography. Lacking Bay’s singular gift for symphonic ultra-violence (and the budget he requires to stage it), the directors opt for a similarly graphic — but even more cartoonish — approach that cheats toward video game aesthetics whenever possible. It’s telling that the most effective display of combat is the one that Mike and Marcus watch from a third-person POV through home security monitors, and that the climactic firefight fully adopts the look of a first-person shooter whenever it’s desperate for a different way to show bodies getting filled with bullets.
And yet, none of the movie’s try-hard appeals to modern audiences are enough to divorce “Ride or Die” from the original spirit of its franchise, and from the glory days of late 20th century blockbusters that it still represents to some degree. From a Lorne Balfe score that openly quotes Hans Zimmer’s theme from “The Rock” to a high-flying hijack sequence that drifts off the memory of “Con Air” to the random cutaway shots of characters holding each other amid a burnt orange sunset as orchestral music keens over the soundtrack, “Ride or Die” is ineffably anchored to the age when Jerry Bruckheimer was king.
Some things have changed for the better (the gay panic that gripped “Bad Boys II” has softened into a more 21st-century take on masculinity that never gets more aggressive than Smith angrily insisting his soul has a dick). But for all the series’ efforts to surround Mike and Marcus with a lore that might live on without them, “Bad Boys” is still a star-driven franchise at a time when precious few of them are left. “Ride or Die” knows how those movies used to work, and it doesn’t forget, even as it resigns itself to the way movies work now. Despite everything that’s crammed into this one, it’s still nothing without Mike and Marcus. And despite everything that Smith has been through since the previous installment, he and Lawrence will always be — as a certain police captain might so preciously choose to put it — our bad boys.
Grade: B-
Sony Pictures will release “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” in theaters on Thursday, June 6.
