These Bad Boys Sequels Need More Gonzo Action Spectacle

Will Smith in Bad Boys: Ride or Die. Photo: Frank Masi/Sony Pictures

Enough time used to pass between installments of the Bad Boys franchise that one didn’t have to recall much from the previous film to enjoy the new one. All that mattered was that Will Smith and Martin Lawrence played a couple of temperamentally mismatched but eternally loyal Miami cop buddies. That ends with Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the fourth of these movies, which assumes a surprising amount of familiarity with the previous entry, 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, which revealed that not only did Smith’s Mike Lowry have an illegitimate son with a dark magic-wielding Mexican mob widow, but that the kid, named Armando Aretas (Jacob Scipio), was a ruthless, expert cartel assassin.

These films, whose thunder was arguably stolen by the Fast and the Furious franchise (which churned out seven fast-cars-and-family entries during the 17-year gap between the second and third Bad Boys flicks), have now fully embraced their more soap-opera-like qualities. So Bad Boys: Ride or Die starts with Mike and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) speeding toward Mike’s wedding to Christine (Melanie Liburd). At the ceremony, they pay tribute to their deceased, beloved police captain, Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano), who was killed by Armando in the last movie. But when the late captain starts getting framed for a series of drug payoffs, Mike and Marcus ride in to redeem their former boss’s good name. Of course, Armando turns out to be the key to the whole thing. And of course, Howard’s bereaved daughter (Rhea Seehorn), a U.S. Marshal, is out to get him for killing her dad.

The highlight remains the chemistry between Smith and Lawrence, who over the years have settled even further into their odd couple back-and-forth. Playboy Mike might be getting married finally, but his past keeps catching up to him; Marcus, the family man, keeps winding up in situations that confirm he’s getting too old for this shit, as Danny Glover used to say in the Lethal Weapon series, a clear influence on these movies. Smith is his usual likable self, but Lawrence really shines, especially as the increasingly exasperated Marcus has a couple of out-of-body experiences that result in all sorts of weirdness. So much of this film hinges on Martin Lawrence being able to deliver lines like “Mike, I wasn’t gonna tell you, but in one of our previous lives, you were a donkey and I owned you.” He also does a nice job vigorously slapping Smith a few times, in a playful nod to the Slap, about which nothing more need be said at this point.

As with any number of blockbuster sequels nowadays, Bad Boys: Ride or Die diffuses its action, giving supporting characters a chance to strut their stuff as well. We even get a fun fight sequence showcasing the skills of Reggie (Dennis Greene), Marcus’s U.S. Marine son-in-law, whose awkward teen self was the victim of one of Bad Boys II’s most immortal bits. It feels at times like the film highlights these other characters because there’s little inspiration otherwise in its set pieces. Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (who also directed the previous entry) try to jazz things up visually, with long-take action sequences in which the camera flies around dizzyingly, jumping between characters, vaulting across spaces, and rotating in rapid-fire fashion from first-person-shooter perspectives to intense handheld close-ups. But in the end, it’s still mostly just dudes shooting other dudes, and it’s not all that interesting.

Nothing here can hold a candle to Bad Boys II’s highway chase involving a car-carrying trailer dumping all its cars onto the road; or Bad Boys II’s chase involving a morgue van dumping all its carcasses on the road; or Bad Boys II’s chase involving a Cuban drug shantytown where all the houses kept blowing up as Mike and Marcus plowed through them. You might see where this is going: Basically, nothing here can match anything in Bad Boys II — which was a mess, certainly, but a glorious mess filled with some of the most ludicrously over-the-top action scenes of all time.

That is not a pointless or picky comparison. Even though sequels are just a fact of life nowadays, they should still offer something new, to some extent. Bad Boys II, coming eight years after the first Bad Boys, didn’t have much of a reason to exist at the time; the stars and the director, Michael Bay, had all become bigger names in the intervening years. But the picture made its case as it roared along, getting crazier and bigger by the minute. These more recent entries in the Bad Boys series, which seem to exist mostly to give Smith and Lawrence much-needed hits, never really assert themselves. Like the Scream movies, or the Transformers movies, or really, like most movies these days, they’re here because our culture demands sequels. By that metric, Bad Boys: Ride or Die serves as passable entertainment. But one does miss the gonzo action spectacles of yore, which this franchise once embodied.