Bad Boys: Ride Or Die

Bad Boys: Ride or Die Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Jacob Scipio, Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Paola Nuñez, Eric Dane, and Ioan Gruffud

Director: Adil and Bilall

What’s Good: Lawrence is back better than ever, and he basically steals the show for everyone else, and it is quite nice seeing him in the spotlight once more.

What’s Bad: Plotwise, the movie makes no sense, and it feels quite confusing at times.

Loo Break: As usual, the second act stretches more than it should, so you could go to the loo right there.

Watch or Not?: If you are in for a fun action movie, then this is a must, thanks to its impressive action and good humor.

Language: English (with subtitles).

Available In: Theaters

Runtime: 120 Minutes

User Rating:

Hollywood has been having a bad time recently, with big tentpole movies like Furiosa and The Fall Guy not meeting their box-office expectations; Hollywood goes back to the past, looking for whatever worked and making it work again. The case in point is Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the fourth film in a franchise that began way back in 1995, and became one of the most successful movies because it stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, who have come back as detectives Mike Lowrey, and Marcus Burnett, as they try to stop corruption in the city of Miami.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die Movie Review: Script Analysis

The entire series of the Bad Boys movies have been made with a single motto, giving the audience a good time. This motto is more apparent than ever in Ride or Die, a movie that is trying to appease an audience that has been hard to capture for many years now. So, it has done it through a solid execution, which includes the best from 90s action cinema, and Martin Lawrence being the main focus for the first time in the series, with newcomers that make everything move along even if the plot is quite a mess.

Let’s get the elephant out of the room first, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is the first big Will Smith movie after the infamous slap incident involving him and Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards on March 27, 2022. Now, the thing is that the slap was such a big controversy that it feels, very clearly, that it has influenced the making of this movie as the focus seems to be more, for the first time, on Lawrence’s character than on Smith’s. Maybe Smith didn’t want to expose himself too much in his comeback, and that might have been the right choice because making Marcus the main protagonist of the piece feels just right.

Smith is a lot in the movie, but he just doesn’t pop off in the way that Lawrence does, thus making this film feel more like a Marcus movie than anything. Jacob Scipio’s character, Armando, also receives a lot of focus in this film. There’s a plot against the Romanian mafia, and so on, but the script is mainly one big montage of amazing action sequences that keep things moving until our characters catch up with the bad guy and teach him a lesson. No one watches the Bad Boys films for the story or the continuity, or the big revelation, and Bad Boys: Ride or Die follows that tradition.

The movies of this franchise are made by the interaction between characters and their dialogue, which feels improvised most of the time, but in a good way, as it makes everything feel natural. Lawrence and Smith, being natural comedians, really make the entire thing work, and you feel for them as characters, and that is just the only thing this movie needs to be worth a watch. There are a couple of cameos here and there that make for some good surprises, but outside the action, it is the humour from these two that will keep you on your seat.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die Movie Review: Star Performance

Like we said before, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is all about Martin Lawrence, even when Will Smith is right next to him most of the time. Smith just doesn’t have the spark that he had in the previous films, but this allows Lawrence to shine immensely, which reminds us why he was once one of the biggest comedians in the industry. Scipio also makes a return from the previous film and does just as well as both Lawrence and Smith. It is clear that Scipio is quite talented, so making him the third member of the main team works in favour of the film.

The rest of the cast is simply there; no one really does a bad job, but the movie is solely focused on the main trio, which sometimes makes the numerous secondary characters feel a bit redundant or useless. It is nice to see Smith and Lawrence have a backup team in this film; however, maybe in the future, these actors and their characters can have a bit more of an impactful film with a proper story, setups, and payoffs.