Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a Mediocre Retread with Some Amazing Action Set-pieces

The third sequel to 1995's Bad Boys is thrilling at times but tired overall.

I vaguely remember watching Bad Boys at some point in my life, possibly/probably while stoned. But that’s the extent of my recollections. 

I do not have strong feelings about the Bad Boys franchise. I have no feelings about it, pretty much, although I am amused that at one point Bad Boys was going to be a more comedy-oriented mismatched buddy cop movie that would reunite stars Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz with their Trapped in Paradise writer-director George Gallo. 

Gallo, who wrote Midnight Run before apparently losing all of his talent in a tragic accident, was apparently not much of a director. He reportedly refused to direct the actors in Trapped in Paradise. 

Gallo apparently told the stars of Trapped in Paradise to read the lines however they liked, and then they’d cobble something halfway watchable in the editing bay-or not! The quality of Trapped in Paradise did not seem terribly important to its writer-director. 

So it’s not surprising that a George Gallo-directed Bad Boys starring Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz did not come to fruition, though Gallo has a story credit for the 1995 hit. 

Bad Boys went in a much different direction. Instead of starring two white television actors without much of a future in film, Bad Boys launched Martin Lawrence and Will Smith as major movie stars. 

That was twenty-nine years ago, so it’s understandable that Bad Boys: Ride or Die’s audience is deeply invested in Will Smith’s Detective Sergeant Michael Eugene "Mike" Lowrey and  Martin Lawrence’s Detective Sergeant Marcus Miles Burnett. 

The screenplay similarly assumes that the Bad Boys’ relationship with Joe Pantoliano’s Captain Conrad Howard is so important and emotionally charged that we all probably wept when he was killed and will tear up at seeing his many posthumous appearances in Bad Boys: Ride or Die. 

Bad Boys: Ride or Die expects us to give a shit about all this nonsense partially because it expects us to care about the actors playing the lead roles as much, if not more, than the characters they play. 

We’ve gone on a marathon journey with these stock cop characters that began when Lawrence and Smith were brash young men at the start of their careers, playing brash young men at the start of their careers now star codgers who were eligible for the AARP membership decades ago. 

We’ve grown up with Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. We’ve been through all manner of highs and lows. So when Martin Lawrence’s character runs into traffic in a manic delirium, we can’t help but reflect that Lawrence did that in real life as well. 

I was disappointed by the curious dearth of commentary on feminine genital hygiene, however, because Lawrence felt very passionately about that issue back when he became one of the least-loved Saturday Night Live hosts. 

Will Smith used to have the cleanest, most manicured image in show business. He was a total phony. America was bewitched. 

Then he went from being Mr. Clean to being the messiest, most drama-loving bitch this side of Donald Trump. 

Remember the spider in Wild, Wild West? That shit was crazy. Apparently, other things have happened to Smith since then, but I have not been paying attention. 

Bad Boys: Ride or Die opens with Mike getting married and his best buddy/partner Marcus having a mild heart attack. 

Surviving the heart attack deludes Marcus into thinking that he’s somehow overcome death and achieved a strange form of immortality. This is redolent of the plot of  Fearless, one of my favorite movies. 

Fearless cast Jeff Bridges in one of his finest roles/performances as a man whose psyche is blown wide open by surviving a plane crash. My favorite late-period Martin Lawrence performance was in The Beach Bum, where he played a wealthy dude who is also exceedingly comfortable in his insanity. 

There is infinite promise in the idea of Lawrence playing someone who no longer cares about propriety and social niceties and feels free to really let his freak flag fly. 

That promise goes almost completely unrealized, however, because Lawrence’s loopiness comes off as canned shtick. A year before the release of Bad Boys, Lawrence released a concert film entitled You So Crazy, after all. 

When Joe Pantoliano’s Captain Conrad Howard is framed as a dirty cop working with cartels, Mike and Marcus set out to clear his name and root out corruption within the police department. 

This puts Mike on a collision course with his adult son  Armando Aretas (Jacob Scipio), a former hitman for the cartel who is an absolute beast of a man. Scipio is so impossibly jacked that when he’s in a cage, it seems like he should be to smash through the bars like a modern-day Samson. 

I vaguely remember Bad Boys. I may or may not have seen Bad Boys 2. I definitely did not see the second sequel, 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, despite it getting the best reviews in the series. 

And by “best reviews,” I mean that it was not widely panned. I suspect that has a lot to do with the directing team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah taking over for Michael Bay. 

In a non-coincidence, Bumblebee, the first Transformer movie not to suck, was directed by someone other than Michael Bay, who has a dopey cameo here. 

Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah return as co-directors, and while I was less than impressed with the film as a whole, I was very impressed by a handful of remarkable set pieces that are gorgeously choreographed, executed, and filmed. 

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a mediocre action movie with some truly magnificent set pieces. It’s a two-star movie with a surprising number of five-star scenes, like a bravura sequence where Marcus’ Marine son-in-law goes full-on John Wick and kills fifteen people at a rapid clip. 

But the directors don’t build on the energy and momentum of the movie’s best moments. Bad Boys: Ride or Die will be amazing for three and a half minutes but then reverts to being a tired and unnecessary third sequel to a movie that wasn’t particularly good in the first place. 

I grew up with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about their characters or their friendship. The melodrama all rings empty because it has no real substance. 

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is yet another sequel that did not need to be made and only intermittently justifies its existence, though it amuses me to imagine an alternate universe where Bad Boys made Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz massive action heroes while Will Smith and Martin Lawrence never successfully made the big leap from the small to the big screen. 

Two stars out of five 

Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!