'Bad Boys Ride Or Die' is Just Stupid Enough to Be Fun

Operator Culture is robbing us of interesting bad guys, but on the plus side there's a giant alligator.

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Bad Boys Ride Or Die is the fourth film in the Bad Boys franchise, and the second to be directed by two Belgian guys, who go by “Adil and Bilall,” professionally (I guess we have the Daniels to blame for this kind of collective billing). Given Michael Bay’s producer credit and his conspicuous cameos in the movies, one gathers that they have his seal of approval. (Crazy how many bystanders are 60-year-old men with Prince Valiant haircuts in the Bad Boys universe).

Everything about BBROD positions A&B as worthy Bay successors. Just as with most of Bay’s movies, Bad Boys Ride Or Die’s main quality is looking expensive. Not necessarily dramatic or funny or exciting, but certainly costly. Professional. They may not have great taste or fresh ideas, but it’s obvious that they’ve spared no expense. And so you feel pampered in some way, like you’ve just been served a lavish dinner and it’s not the greatest thing you’ve ever eaten but there’s caviar on it so you know you’re really living.

Bad Boys Ride Or Die actually works. It’s not a thrilling action film or a hilarious comedy by any stretch, but it’s a fun enough time for the self-selecting audience who paid to see a Bad Boys movie (which includes me mostly out of duty, after we devoted a whole month to Martin Lawrence movies on the Frotcast). Just when it starts to get a little boring, an alligator shows up in the third act. Eat your heart out, Jon Peters. In fact, Adil and Bilall seem, if anything, a little more willing than Bay was to embrace schlock and go full B-movie, retaining Bay’s maximalism without some of his pomposity. It’s a small tweak, but it’s nice.

Bay, of course, got his start in commercials (the Aaron Burr Got Milk ad, arguably the most memorable commercial of the 90s? that was him). No matter how big his budgets got or how long his run times, he was still, essentially, directing commercials. Commercials involve storytelling, but the main goal is to make the product seem cool and shiny and luxurious. As such, Bay’s most memorable imagery (usually shot from a low angle, maybe with the camera rotating around the subject) is usually a hero looking flashy and cool. He has a few other quirks as a filmmaker, like that every character, even the smallest ones, tend to have an instantly recognizable shtick (think: the streetcar driver in The Rock). He seems to divide all humanity into either slut or clown (sexpot or jester, there’s no in between). Oh, and there’s always a cool car. You know how rom-com directors always like to say that “the city is like another character?” The main character in a Michael Bay movie usually the car.

Which made the Bad Boys franchise an obvious fit, on the face of it. You had a slut (Will Smith) and a clown (Martin Lawrence) and a concept built entirely out of a commercial jingle (Bad boys, bad boys, whatchoo gonna doo…), featuring a car Michael Bay actually owned. Will Smith was kind of a weird fit for the slut back in 1995, before Ali and Independence Day and all the other movies he got to look tough and buff and sweaty in, when he was still mostly the big-eared funny guy from The Fresh Prince (the other indelible theme song of the 90s). Credit Bay with some foresight there. Still, aside from tweaking the interracial buddy cop formula (into a monoracial cop formula), Bad Boys was pretty paint-by-numbers, as a concept. Cool guys do cool stuff in cool place. Which is to say, Miami, a city so cool to those involved that Will Smith released a song called “Welcome to Miami” shortly after. This franchise obliterates subtext, a sort of cinematic “this mom runs on Disney and Starbucks” t-shirt.

Bad Boys Ride Or Die begins with Mike Lowery (Will Smith) getting married. Being that Mike is the slut and Marcus the clown (Martin Lawrence), Marcus gets to give a big, tearful speech about how happy he is to see Mike settle down after so many years of… well, being a slut. Yet Marcus has only just finished the toast when he collapses onto the dance floor, the victim of a surprise heart attack. Only he doesn’t just have a health scare, he actually goes to heaven, depicted as a sort of deserted moonlit beach, where he meets their old captain, played by Joe Pantoliano. Joey Pants smiles a lot and they hug, and just before Marcus returns to the land of the living, he whispers something in Marcus’s ear, Bill Murray in Lost in Translation-style.

Marcus emerges from the experience full of all sorts of knowledge from the beyond, like that he and Mike have been soul mates throughout the ages, and that he can’t die yet because it’s just not his time. He tells Mike that Mike is about to be tested and he’s “going to have to choose.” This is apparently what Joey Pants whispered in Marcus’s ear on afterlife beach. It’s unclear why he was whispering, since there was no one else there with them, but the ways of afterlife knowledge are mysterious like that.

Anyway, there’s a dirty cop played by Eric Dane, and he’s trying to sully Joey Pants’ legacy, and Joey Pants’ daughter, a US Marshal played by Rhea Seehorn is involved, along with Mike’s ex-drug soldier son, Armando (Jason Scipio), who Mike and Marcus apparently threw in prison in the last movie. It seems to be a really steamy prison with metal cages in the middle of a giant warehouse lit by overhead spotlights.

Throughout, one thing notably missing from Bad Boys Ride or Die is an interesting villain. It seems “operator” culture is systematically robbing us of interesting action movie villains these days. We always just get some Liev Schreiber type in fatigues as the heavy with a bunch of discount Liver Kings as his underlings and the occasional ex-MMA guy thrown in for good measure. Steroids and beards and cauliflower ears, oh my, all spouting the same special forces jargon. It’s all a bit boring, isn’t it? Tactical homogeneity.

Meanwhile, just to prove that Michael Bay and the Bad Boys brain trust still respect AMERICA, the franchise introduces a new character, in the form of Marcus’s son-in-law, Reggie (Dennis McDonald). Reggie is “squared away,” basically a human salute and the proverbial Marine Todd of bootlicker fantasy. For everyone who ever wondered if an all-troop football team could take on the Super Bowl champs, there’s Reggie, who reminds an addled Marcus that he’s in the Marine Corps and just got back from Yemen (I considered interrogating the politics of this, but my gut tells me the screenwriters just chose a country in the Middle East at random). At one point, Mike and Marcus watch Reggie kill 15 commandos before clicking his heels and saluting Marcus’s Ring camera. What Bad Boys Ride Or Die lacks in interesting villains it does make up for in super Troops saluting a Ring camera. God bless America.