In 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) says the quiet part out loud about how he and Mike Lowery (Will Smith) had “more days behind them than in front,” and wondered if playing cops and robbers was how they wanted to spend their remaining time. Granted, that film still ended wildly, with Mike fighting his own son and his ex, an actual witch, in a building on fire, but that’s neither here nor there. Adil & Bilall’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die, as it turns out, takes the question a bit more seriously, especially after Mike finds himself finally getting hitched to a beautiful woman (Melanie Liburd) and, in the wake of the death of Joe Pantoliano’s Captain Howard, has Anakin Skywalker-esque nightmares about losing her.
That’s only just barely a joke. With the filmmakers desperate to keep Joey Pants in the film, Ride or Die has him turning into the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the franchise. His “ghost” haunts Marcus after a heart attack puts the detective in a coma, and the captain’s covert investigation into Miami P.D.’s cartel moles is at the center of a convoluted plot involving secret text messages triggered after Howard’s death, helping Mike and Marcus finish what he started.
On paper, it sounds—and is—preposterous. And the fact that Ride or Die still represents a pretty sedate downturn from the days when Marcus was getting shot in the ass at Klan rallies, and him and Mike were having cars tossed at them like red shells in Mario Kart, underlines the singular insanity of Michael Bay’s direction of the first two films in the series. But despite being unlike Bay’s blustery style of filmmaking, a different kind of insanity guides Adil & Bilall’s direction here: It’s in its occasionally dreamlike flourishes, its willingness to bathe even innocuous scenes in neon purples and greens, and the way the camera floats through the visceral action, making it seem like we’re watching Gaspar Noé at the wheel of a Fast and the Furious movie.
Beyond the aesthetic of Ride or Die, though, it’s also noticeable how much the film, written by Chris Bremner and Will Beall, is focused on the younger characters, with Mike and Marcus as the old men who seem increasingly out of place in a new world of criminals and crime-fighting that requires a more surgical approach to things. Just about anyone over 40 who isn’t Eric Dane’s grizzled turncoat scumbag villain comes off as wildly unable to adapt.
That focus actually plays rather well in Ride or Die’s favor. It’s strangely comforting to see Mike and Marcus bicker like an old married couple during gunfights, riffing endlessly on the preposterous circumstances they find themselves in, and Mike reacting to Marcus continuing to go off an absurd deep end with the new-agey spirituality that be started subscribing to in Bad Boys II. Their chemistry is what held the series aloft from the beginning, and still does so on a basic level here. But Smith and Lawrence can’t carry the action by themselves anymore, and as such the most thrilling parts of the film all belong to the younger cast.
The eclectic and well-drawn AMMO team introduced in Bad Boys for Life returns here (sans, inexplicably, May December’s Charles Melton), and Jacob Scipio’s Armando runs off with every scene he’s in, especially during a short but brutal prison fight (shades of The Raid). But it’s Dennis Greene’s Reggie—the butt of one of the most scathingly hilarious moments in the entire series—who comes full circle with the film’s absolute best, crowd-popping action sequence.
That leaves Smith and Lawrence in a strange place, and, one could theorize, a transitional one. The last film already saw Marcus hanging up his guns, and this one sees Mike preparing to do the same until necessity puts both of them on the run. Ride or Die plays out like it might be preparing us to let go of its big-name legacy leads. It’s strange to think of this series, one that so thoroughly built its identity on the backs of Smith and Lawrence’s chemistry, without them, but there’s enough energy going on here to make the case that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
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