Bad Boys: Ride Or Die SUCKS

Bad Boys will be 30 years old next year, and you can bet I will wax nostalgic about it in a big way. It is an elite example of the action comedy genre, and as an add-on, launched the career of Michael Bay and solidified the rising stardom of Will Smith and the then first-billed Martin Lawrence.

Years later, we got Bad Boys 2. I wasn't quite as high on this one, mostly for plot reasons, but the action and comedy still worked.

Then, back in early 2020, before hell arrived in its many forms, we got another entry, Bad Boys For Life. At the time, I was fairly disappointed in it. Bay didn't direct, and it just didn't feel right. I rewatched it just as a refresher recently, and it was worse than I remember. Way too little comedy, nothing too memorable in the action, and the main plot and villain was just bad.

That movie still, thanks to COVID, wound up being 2020's top grosser, so we were always going to get a #4. 

I wish we hadn't.

Bad Boys: Ride Or Die is genuinely, stunningly bad. Not just disappointing. Not just mediocre. Bad. Awful. Depressing to sit through, as all involved took all of 4 Life's worst traits and doubled down. I am not naturally prone to extreme negative reactions to films.

I knew we were in trouble early. The pre-title sequence is a deeply unfunny bit where a very hungry Lawrence stops off at a convenience store, just before it gets robbed. 

Then, minutes later, he collapses at Smith's wedding due to a heart attack, and he has some weird vision sequence where he sees the deceased Joe Pantoliano police captain character. 

What IS this? Bad Boys used to be funny.

The main plot here involves Eric Dane as one of the all-time most boring movie villains, executing a frame job on Pantoliano that winds up ensnaring Smith and Lawrence and putting them on the run from the law.

Oh, I forgot something. Remember the bad guy from the last film, who turned out to be Smith's long-lost son (what IS this?)? He's along for the ride because reasons, even though he was a dreadfully dull presence last time and is the same here. It doesn't help that he looks about 10 years younger than Smith, so him being his son never works.

This is such a lifeless slog of a movie. The movie throws in a bunch of new characters that aren't interesting, along with dragging back in returning characters that weren't exactly needed or wanted. Look, I like Vanessa Hudgens a lot, but her cop character was a nothing last time, and fares no better here. We get TWO previously unmentioned members of Pantoliano's family. One is a daughter who is one of the dullest, dumbest federal agent characters ever. And her daughter is also here, basically just to get kidnapped. 

It's weird how this film has so little use for its female cast. That cop lady from 3 who had some charisma and looked to be set up as a Smith love interest is here just wasted and stupid, married to a character whose villainy is dreadfully obvious. 

I guess good for Theresa Randle, who for no particular reason gets re-cast here despite her character only being in a couple of scenes. And Charles Melton was clearly too busy to return from 3.

All of this is in the service of a plot that is even more serious and melodramatic than the last movie. I have seen some people saying they are turning Bad Boys into Fast and the Furious. That's hugely insulting to the latter. Fast and Furious was never an action conedy. It has comedy at times, but drama was always its style. Bad Boys was a comedy. It was built on the backs of two very comedically gifted sitcom stars. But now these movies seem so disinterested in any comedy that when they do try it here, it feels out of place and rarely, if ever, works. Smith seems completely disengaged to a degree I have never seen. Lawrence does a lot of mugging, but almost none of it works. And you're not getting laughs from anywhere else in this bloated cast. 

But maybe the movie could have still eeked by if the action was really good. Well, that doesn't work either. The film has a couple of creative sequences, one in the POV of a gun and the other involving a set of security cameras. But Michael Bay these guys are not. It's like 95% just generic shootout stuff. Not necessarily bad, but certainly not enough to salvage this sinking ship. 

This movie is already doing well, and given how things are these days at the box office, I will not root for any movie to fail. And it also probably means there will be a Bad Boys 5. But I'm out. Unless there is a major shift away from what this franchise has turned into,  I don't want to see any more Bad Boys movies.