'Bad Boys: Ride or Die' review: Will Smith's action movie continues

The first “Bad Boys” came out in 1995, which means we're officially entering aging action star territory with this franchise. “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” a fourth installment, is directed by the up-and-coming team of action filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, known as Adil & Bilall, who took over directing duties from Michael Bay with “Bad Boys.” of 2020. Guys for life.”

There seem to be only two options for a rising action star (or franchise) in years. You can take the Tom Cruise route, returning to a text that was originally all flash and sensation, and infusing it with a sense of poignant intensity as the character (and actor) recognizes what he's sacrificed in his pursuit of pure adrenaline (e.g. “Top Gun: Maverick”). The other option is to join the rough-and-tumble supergroup modeled by the “Expendables” series, in which beloved stars bicker and fight over cash.

But in the “Bad Boys” movies, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence and producer Jerry Bruckheimer aren't looking to change much about what made the franchise successful in the first place. In fact, Smith, who has faced significant public upheaval in recent years, is strangely ageless and unaffected in his portrayal of Miami detective Mike Lowery, and here he easily reverts to Mike mode. The strange thing is that it seems so normal to see him in this role.

Adil and Bilall take the basic scaffolding and structure of the previous films (the Miami setting, the character archetypes Smith and Lawrence have established, Bay's distinctive visual language) and, moreover, the freestyle. The directors dutifully pay homage to Bay's signature style, mimicking his constantly moving camera, low angles, and the “Bad Boys shot,” in which the camera pans around Smith and Lawrence as they stand in the frame, staring into the distance. far. They treat the “Bad Boys” template like a coloring book, scribbling their own wild artistic experimentation over the lines.

“Bad Boys: Ride or Die” is a declaration of action independence, using new technologies like drones and infusing the film with the grammar of video games. Bay himself used drones with some gonzo ingenuity in his 2022 film “Ambulance,” but Adil and Bilall use his drone to track people and movement in space and explore the geography of interiors.

They also use wild, rapidly changing first-person shooter-style POV shots in gunfights, which are readable to the average gamer even if they don't always make cinematic sense. They can easily get away with layering this kind of stylistic experimentation because the beats of “Bad Boys” are so familiar and, as unfolded on “Ride or Die,” essentially superficial.

Writers Chris Bremner and Will Beall offer a broad but shallow story. There's certainly a lot of plot and even more characters, even if we don't get to know them very well. This complicated story concerns the late Bad Boys Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano), who has been posthumously indicted for corruption, accused of sharing information with drug cartels. Fellow cops Marcus (Lawrence) and Mike (Smith) seek to clear their names, but find themselves at odds with Howard's daughter, US Marshal Judy (Rhea Seehorn), bent on revenge, and her colleague Rita (Paola Nuñez), who has brought the charges through her fiancé, lawyer candidate and mayor, Lockwood (Ioan Gruffud). Their only chance to point out the real bad guy is Armando (Jacob Scipio), Mike's drug-dealing son, who has been imprisoned for the bloody mayhem he caused in “For Life.”

Meanwhile, our guys are dealing with their own mortality and PTSD. After a near-death experience at Mike's wedding, Marcus finds himself spiritually renewed, feeling invincible, euphoric, and babbling about his past lives. Mike, on the other hand, is gripped by anxiety as a newlywed and a “new” father.

But this simply provides the playing field in which the filmmakers can experiment and Lawrence can clown to his heart's content. His performance is striking, but there's something about him that simply wears you down over the course of two hours: one simply must submit to his comedic ministrations. The first half of the film is overly concerned with Marcus's sugar addiction and during a shootout at an interactive art gallery, he takes a single sip of fruit punch and reacts as if it were freebase meth. That theme is quickly abandoned for other equally cartoonish bits, like an encounter with a Southern militia, a callback to their infiltration of the Klan in the second film, and a side mission to a strip club, where they hook up with Tiffany Haddish.

“Bad Boys: Ride or Die” never finds its own tone, but then, the franchise has always walked the strange line of silly and harsh, teetering between Lawrence and Smith, and despite the cinematic experimentation of the co-directors and a With a couple of impressively unpleasant fight scenes (courtesy of the younger actors), this installment favors the suckers. It's a fine tapestry of story with some interesting creative flourishes, but without any real interest in the character, it feels flimsy and disposable. You could do worse, but you certainly could do better.

Katie Walsh is a film critic for the Tribune News Service.