God bless Martin Lawrence. It’s a refrain I go to again and again whenever he shows up in a movie these days because it’s just true: The man is just as effortlessly funny as he was in the ‘90s (and I know a ton of effort goes into being funny, it’s just that it feels that way). A big part of why the last Bad Boys movie — For Life, even though it was the third — didn’t work is because it focused a bit too much on the internal struggles of hyper-macho Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and his discovering that decades of playin’ around lead him to have, you know, responsibilities and consequences for his actions. Lawrence was weirdly on the sidelines for that one, though he did turn in a surprisingly deep performance in an otherwise shallow picture, which added ennui and subtracted the ferocious intensity, competence, and theatrical ugliness of the Michael Bay-helmed installments.
Bay has a way of perfectly summing up American cinema and culture almost by accident, being a creature of the eternal present without intending to be fully timely, and a more stagey production robbed Lawrence of that kind of potent spontaneity that made him such a memorable component in these two-handers. But his absence was acutely felt even with the glossy production values that directors Bilal and Abil brought to the production – it just wasn’t what it could have been, and, what’s more, it was a January release.
But the Bad Boys are back in the summer sunshine, and the latest outing from the For Life brain trust, the swell Bad Boys: Ride or Die, is the kind of throwback pseudo-Bayhem that we were all hoping for in the halcyon days of January 2020. Why? Well, it’s because the pair decided to offload some of the Lowery-heavy plot bits and to let Lawrence do his thing, all while tapping into their predecessor’s contributions as a practical – not theoretical – influence. Hell, it’s clear from the beginning just how different this is – we start with Lowery tearing up the Miami streets on the way to a very important date in his Porsche, with Marcus (Lawrence) whining and close to hurling in the passenger seat. The poor motion-sick dude needs some ginger ale, and Mike relents, letting Marcus out at a convenience store with a 90-second window for him to get in and out. Of course, Marcus fucks around and grabs some Skittles and a three-day-old hot dog as well, and delays it just long enough for a stick-up man to run in and demand the cash. After a short negotiation, an argument with an unhelpful cashier, and one of Lowery’s bullets winding up in the thief’s leg, they make their way to that big event they’re rushing to – Mike’s wedding, where he’s finally tying the knot with a physical therapist that he met in the last movie while rehabbing his gunshot wound.
But all’s not cool with the gang at this celebration: This time, it’s Marcus’ health that’s in jeopardy. After giving his best man’s speech and memorializing their fallen friend, Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano), Marcus has a massive heart attack on the dance floor. He’s suddenly immersed in a bunch of afterlife imagery from an avant-garde music video and winds up meeting Howard’s spirit on a beach next to some washed-up wood and a parrot. Howard lets him know that it’s not his time and that some bad shit is going to happen to them in the next few months and tells Marcus some cryptic shit so that he can relay said cryptic shit to Mike. When he wakes up, new stints and all, Marcus has a born-again euphoria – he’s seen the other side, and knows that it’s not his time, and vows to use this new knowledge to improve his life and annoy the living fuck out of Mike. This is the major difference between For Life and Ride or Die – sure, the action’s a bit better, but it’s much heavier on the banter (and brotherhood) between the two leads, getting closer to the hangout movie status that made the originals so compelling when they weren’t just, you know, destroying whole swathes of freeway or winding up in Gitmo.
Once the wheels on this bus truly start to turn – a shadowy group is trying to frame Captain Howard as the root of all corruption within the Miami PD, to which both Mike and Marcus take a deep offense and wind up afoul of the joint government-agency taskforce looking into these allegations – the banter doesn’t stop, with the story once again taking a backseat to the simple pleasures of frequent jokes and jolts from the action sequences. This re-establishment of the tone even makes For Life stronger in retrospect – the new additions to the cast, such as Mike’s son (Jacob Sciopo), are used in a much stronger fashion than they were previously, becoming much more compelling when they’re not deployed in service of, say, an already overwrought midlife-crisis plotline. They get to be funny and badass in equal measure, with the refined style of the directors acting as a compliment rather than a distraction. The film’s final action sequence – a mayhem-filled raid on a former alligator zoo – is full of the patented ridiculousness that Bay brought to the franchise, even with a different kind of panache to it. We’ve got first-person action with gun-mounted cameras and drone shots aplenty, with even a bit of that Bay political incorrectness popping up in the form of drone-mounted and dropped grenades – a touch that feels like what the master would have done if he were shooting Bad Boys II in 2024 instead of 2003.
But what Bad Boys: Ride or Die really wants is to thoroughly entertain its audience – hence the elevation of Lawrence to proper co-lead, with him being placed in situations that are primed for his riffs at each and every turn, such as when he’s forced to steal some clothes from some Florida rednecks while on the lam. He’s confronted by the hicks at the business ends of their shotguns and tries to argue that they’re his clothes without realizing exactly what the hoodie he’s wearing says. It’s done in an awesome way, with Smith serving as a swell straight-man compliment. Lawrence’s work here allows him to be, you know, charming and funny rather than brooding (even if we do see him suffer through panic attacks and such, a bit of an unwelcome hangover from the For Life interpretation of Lowery’s character).
It aims to reward attentive viewers – both of this feature and of the previous ones – and contains a moment of unexpected-yet-earned badassery that has been in at least three films in the making. This devotion to detail and tone fully pays off, with my audience regularly erupting with laughter and excitement, much like they did with Bad Boys II back in the day. It’s a bummer that this is an aberration in the current cinematic landscape – entertaining, competent, thrilling, and full of well-constructed gags rather than ironic Whedonisms – but we’re just lucky that we’ve got Martin Lawrence here to remind you how good it is when you just hold up and let him cook for a bit.