★ | Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah
The second Bad Boys film, directed with unhinged energy by Michael Bay, is a unique train wreck masterpiece. It’s a mean, cynical, nihilistic piece of copaganda. A surreal dive into the psyche of a filmmaker who went from aw-shucks Americana to far right gundamentalism faster than you can say Armageddon.
But, and it’s a big but, Bad Boys 2 is still a work of vision. That vision is inherently toxic and awful, but you can’t deny that it looks and sounds like Michael Bay.
21 years later, we have Bad Boys: Ride or Die, a film that wants to be like Bad Boys 2, but directed without any stylistic flair or vision. The result is the same as seeing a kid mimic the actions of a grown up. The basics are there, and it might be done in earnest, but it’s still a clumsy re-enactment.
Don’t get me wrong, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is still a deeply distasteful, ugly, misogynist and morally questionable product. It’s just not entertaining about it. A good propagandist is also a good artist. They create iconic images to promote their vision. Take that out of the picture, and all you have is a potty mouth ranting on a street corner.
It would be unkind to dump this entirely on the shoulders of the film’s directors. Everything from the script onwards feels like it was slapped together at the last minute. Martin Lawrence and Will Smith return to the parts that made them into superstars, and both give a new definition to the term “phoning it in.” They look bored and tired of this shtick, and I don’t blame them. I am, too.
If you’ve sat through any of the previous Bad Boys films, you know what to expect. This is basically a vanity project at this point, at least for Smith, though I don’t quite know what Lawrence gets out of it. His character is consistently the butt of the jokes, and they range from the usual fat shaming to homophobia and how he’s not a real man because he shows his emotions. If that sounds familiar, it’s exactly the same set of tropes that Bay paraded around in the early 2000s. Nothing has changed, and that’s what makes it all the more sad.
Smith shows none of the wit and charm that made him a global icon. He’s a genuinely likeable screen presence, and a stellar actor when he wants to be. Here, he just is, as if there’s an expectation that we’re supposed to meet him halfway. After all, he’s back in a safe, undemanding part. But that’s not how things work, and it’s an extremely frustrating experience to see him waste his and our time like this.
The film is strung together by what’s called an Idiot Plot. In film, an idiot plot can only happen if everyone involved behaves like an idiot. Watching Bad Boys: Ride or Die, you can count the ways the story would end at any given moment if anyone just stopped for two minutes and behaved like a real person. It’s not why we go see these films, but it is worth noting. Even in a fantasy world like this, sometimes you have to call a time-out.
If only this film was fun or if the action was spectacular. You can forgive a lot when you’re entertained. But Bad Boys: Ride or Die belongs to the school of filmmaking that is deprived of visual coherence, style, or even a sense of urgency. It borrows from the iconography of video games and previous Michael Bay films, yet has nothing to say or express that would be its own. Compare it to the tremendous spectacle of Furiosa and Bad Boys appears lifeless and puny in comparison. Hell, compare it to Bad Boys 2 and the result is the same. Bay’s style might be hyperkinetic, but there’s no denying that he can’t put together incendiary imagery, like that of Will Smith firing upon Ku Klux Klan members in front of a burning cross.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a product more than it is a film. It’s a safety net for Smith, still recovering from a disastrous hit his public persona took a few years ago. This is his comeback vehicle, and there’s something distasteful about how calculated it feels. Like everyone is counting steps to make sure it’s precisely average, no more, no less. Except in doing so, Bad Boys: Ride or Die only manages to highlight just how much heavy lifting Bay’s style over substance approach did for this franchise. Without that flair, Bad Boys is a lifeless parody of itself.
Toisto 