Bad Boys: Ride or Die

**A Villain Without Depth, A Plot Without Weight – Ride or Die Stumbles** The title of the movie has little to do with the actual plot—a point many have noted before.The story follows Mike Lowry and Marcus Burnett, as they face major life changes. Mike finally settles down and gets married, while Marcus undergoes a temporary health crisis that shifts his outlook on life. Amidst this, a shocking revelation emerges: new evidence suggests their late former boss, Captain Howard, was corrupt and involved with Mexican drug cartels. Unsurprisingly, Mike and Marcus refuse to believe this accusation. I wasn’t excited about this movie for several reasons, one being my dislike for the previous movie. Since the directors, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, remained the same, I didn’t expect significant improvements. The movie starts off well by avoiding a major flaw from the last one—the jarring shift between serious and comedic tones. Will Smith, despite my overall disappointment with the movie, delivered an energetic performance, and his comedic timing felt genuinely sincere. However, the story itself is underwhelming and below average. The premise—a beloved former police captain’s reputation being tarnished—lacks depth, and the explanation for his alleged corruption is unconvincing. The plot feels incomplete, and both the beginning and ending are mediocre, which is a significant drawback. Another issue lies in the villains. The antagonist in this film is poorly written and unconvincing—evil simply for the sake of having a villain, rather than being a well-developed character. This weakens the movie further. Ultimately, it seems the filmmakers assumed audiences would watch simply because it’s another Bad Boys movie, not because of a compelling story. The characters lack depth, the plot offers nothing new, and no fresh dimensions are added to the franchise.

I will not deny that I found this movie somewhat entertaining. Maybe even fairly entertaining. This mostly comes from the action and a few entertaining humorous scenes splattered across the movie. However, it could have been so much better if the script had not been written by the usual bunch of low IQ Hollywood hacks. Most of the humor is just unintelligent and cringeworthy. Marcus Burnett is simply nonsensically silly most of the time. His feeding nonsense followed by this ridiculous “I am immortal” crap and rubbish dream scenes were not funny at all but rather dragged down the movie. The attempt to create drama by making Lowrey have psychotic episodes which ruined the mission and action on several occasions was also totally unnecessary in my opinion. The bad guy started off really good with the first scenes where the entire plot is set up. Then however, he just became your average Hollywood villain. The initial badass bad guy vibe was never developed. The script itself is a classical Hollywood action script. That is, it is simple, very predictable, unrealistic with lots of plot holes and really just a rehash of something done a million times. However, in this context, it was not bad. It was certainly good enough for this type of movie. This could have been a really good movie if the task of coming up with a script had just been given to someone with some actual talent. As it stands this is just a somewhat (maybe even fairly) entertaining Hollywood action movie.

Good job, Bad Boys. You're gonna make a satisfying film when I come for you. I kind of ignored the first hour and a half but definitely the first hour. It might be for the best but Lawrence is good. Will is good. But they're also bad. I like the spiritual overtones and comedy. Satisfying buddy comedy. The drones are sweet. I liked the AI camera effects. The psycho killer younger guys are good. Insane violence at the end. Seemed so PG until you hit the violence and there is so much celebration of violence. Maybe I missed some previous violence but it seemed quite intense and sudden. I hope they make a sequel with the psychos. Grandpas can Denzel some guys. Hopefully they'll match their speech with the rest of the graphic content. All the humour is so tame. I hear you get to say more shit when you get old. BBCU4L