[Ad - Sponsored by Entertainment Earth] Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are back as their Miami buddy cops, but this time they're on the run, and Film Brain finds this to be a surprisingly enjoyable 90s action throwback.
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00:00 This video is sponsored by Entertainment Earth.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector and on this episode,
00:05 when Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are framed and forced to go on the run,
00:09 it's ride or die for the bad boys.
00:12 [music]
00:29 Mike Lowry and Marcus Burnett, played by Will Smith and Martin Lawrence,
00:32 are disturbed to learn their former captain Howard,
00:34 played by Joe Pantoliano, has been framed as corrupt and working with drug cartels.
00:39 Mike and Marcus set out to clear his name, aided by messages left by Howard
00:43 and with the help of Mike's incarcerated son Armando,
00:46 played by Jacob Scipio, who can identify the real dirty cops.
00:50 But when they get too close, Mike, Marcus and Armando narrowly escape
00:54 and attempt on their lives and are forced to go on the run
00:56 when Mike and Marcus are framed as well.
00:59 You might not believe it, but this year marks the 30th anniversary
01:02 of the Bad Boys franchise.
01:04 I know, scary, right?
01:05 There's been that long since the original film put Will Smith,
01:08 Martin Lawrence and Michael Bay on the map.
01:11 But I do have a bit of a confession to sheepishly make.
01:14 I've never been a big fan of the franchise.
01:17 I actually revisited the original film after I saw the second one,
01:20 so maybe that tainted my expectations somewhat.
01:23 But you can definitely tell that Bay is moving from being a music video director
01:27 into being a film director.
01:29 His style was definitely there, but it's not quite as developed as it would be
01:33 for better and for worse in his later movies.
01:36 In fact, I actually prefer some of Bay's earlier work
01:39 to some of the stuff he did after it.
01:41 But the problem I have with the original Bad Boys is,
01:44 while it has some great set pieces, especially that big finale,
01:48 because Bay knows how to handle explosions,
01:51 it often feels like a sitcom, especially in the middle of the movie,
01:54 where there's this kind of mix-up between Mike and Marcus with Taylor Leone.
01:59 I never really could get into the first one.
02:02 The second film, though, is probably what people think of
02:05 when they think of Bad Boys,
02:07 especially because by that point, Bay had really developed as a director.
02:12 The action in that movie is absolutely insane,
02:15 especially that sequence where they're throwing cars onto the freeway
02:19 and all the just massive explosions that are taking place.
02:22 But of course, you've got the other Michael Bay stuff as well,
02:26 which includes lots of very questionable humour
02:29 that I was going to say hasn't dated all that well,
02:32 but I'm not sure it actually was particularly all that good back in 2003.
02:37 And also, an insanely overlong running time of two and a half hours.
02:42 But I do have to say that there are plenty of people
02:45 that really do love Bad Boys 2,
02:48 especially given that there's this kind of ironic love for it
02:51 that's developed since Hot Fuzz,
02:53 which very much put it prominently alongside Point Break
02:56 as the kind of over-the-top cop movies that it was paying homage to.
03:00 There was, of course, a long gap between the second and the third film,
03:03 which was stuck in development hell for over a decade,
03:06 but we finally got it in 2020 with Bad Boys for Life,
03:10 this time with Belgian directors Adel and Blau
03:12 taking the place of Michael Bay in the director's chair.
03:15 And you know what?
03:16 I was actually surprised at how much I liked it
03:19 when I finally caught up with it in lockdown,
03:21 having skipped the movie theatrically because I was so lukewarm on the series.
03:26 But I thought that Adel and Blau did a great job of homaging Michael Bay's direction,
03:30 and maybe in some senses kind of improving on it.
03:33 We'll get back to that a bit later.
03:35 But if there was an issue with the movie,
03:37 it's that I felt that the script was actually quite melodramatic in that film's case,
03:42 especially with all these plot lines about Mike's secret love life
03:46 and the paternity of Armando.
03:48 Very, very sort of telenovela stuff.
03:51 But 2020 being what it was, it was one of the highest-grossing films that year,
03:56 so a fourth entry was very quickly announced,
03:59 which for Bad Boys standards was quite a quick turnaround.
04:03 Much of the team for the third film reunite for Ride or Die,
04:05 including writer Chris Bremner,
04:07 but a lot has happened between the two movies.
04:10 Adel and Blau went on to make Batgirl, which was notoriously cancelled during post-production.
04:16 Will Smith committed an incredible act of career sabotage.
04:19 So the question becomes, is there still nostalgia for the Bad Boys?
04:24 Can they still strike lightning in a bottle?
04:27 And the answer is, surprisingly, yes.
04:30 Given all that I've just said, you'll probably be completely unsurprised to hear
04:33 that the script for Bad Boys Ride or Die is probably one of its weaker points.
04:37 I know, shocking, right?
04:40 But considering that it's from the same team that wrote the third movie,
04:43 I do think they replicate too much of that here at times,
04:46 to the point where it almost feels like it's rehashing itself,
04:50 especially in the pre-title sequence,
04:52 where we get a near-identical opener to Bad Boys for Life,
04:57 where Mike is racing around Miami, this time to get to his own wedding,
05:02 and that has Marcus in the passenger seat trying again not to throw up,
05:07 but this time they stop at a store where Marcus ends up getting holed up.
05:12 And again, that is a reference to the original Bad Boys
05:15 because it's the same store, they're buying Skittles once again,
05:20 and it almost feels like the series is just locked into referencing itself.
05:25 And that feeling is also enhanced by the fact that we get the same cameos and guest appearances.
05:30 DJ Khaled turns up again in this movie for some reason,
05:34 for a whole whopping 30 seconds he pops up,
05:37 and yeah, I did get a bit of a giggle out of what they do with that character,
05:41 but still, why is he here for a second time?
05:44 Also, a certain someone else pops up in a very Stan Lee-esque cameo.
05:49 Yeah, I did kind of like that actually.
05:51 But that means that we get even more melodrama playing off the revelations of its predecessor,
05:56 especially focusing on the relationship between Mike and Armando,
05:59 because Mike is forced to go to his incarcerated son for help,
06:02 and then, over the course of the movie, they end up forced to work together,
06:06 despite the fact there's a lot of tension at play in this family dynamic,
06:11 not least of which because the son is very resentful at Mike for murdering his mother,
06:17 although she was trying to kill him in his defence,
06:20 but also the fact that he abandoned him for 20 years.
06:24 They do learn to eventually trust each other, and the boy does start to come good,
06:29 you know, aside from the fact that he's murdered quite a few people over the course of these two movies,
06:34 but still, there's a bit of a redemption arc going on.
06:38 I was never entirely convinced by this storyline,
06:41 but of course, that's because I think that the revelations about Mike's paternity are overwrought in the first place.
06:48 But if there wasn't enough family dynamics at play here,
06:51 we also have Captain Howard's family introduced in this movie,
06:56 including his daughter, a US Marshal, who's played by Ria Seahorn from Better Call Saul.
07:02 She is very underutilised, and again, you've got this tension between her and Mike,
07:08 because Armando was the one that assassinated her father in the last movie,
07:13 and they introduce this daughter character as if she's been a part of these movies,
07:19 even though she's actually new to this entry.
07:21 You have loads of characters go, "Oh, you've been a part of my life for years," and things like that,
07:26 and it just feels a little bit false, because you go,
07:29 "Wait, I don't remember her being in any of these previous movies."
07:33 You can't just pull out a daughter and a granddaughter completely out of thin air.
07:37 Well, I guess you can in this movie's case.
07:40 But you think that Seahorn's character is going to be quite important,
07:44 because she's leading the authorities on their tale,
07:48 but actually, that's not really the case at all.
07:52 The character kind of drifts in and out of the narrative depending on when it needs her,
07:57 and often, it just simply doesn't.
07:59 It feels like a character that either should have been more involved or just written out entirely.
08:05 It's definitely symptomatic of a movie that has way too many characters.
08:08 You've got loads of cast members brought back from previous Bad Boys movies.
08:12 You've got a whole bunch of new characters as well, some of which are linked to the Legacy cast.
08:16 It gets a bit much for the movie to juggle.
08:19 Tiffany Haddish pops up halfway through the movie because Mike and Marcus need her help,
08:23 and that scene largely exists for Haddish to just be vulgar,
08:27 you know, just riff for like three minutes straight about Will Smith going downtown on her.
08:33 There's no reason for that scene to be in the movie.
08:35 The character could be completely eliminated from the script,
08:38 and it would have no impact on the movie whatsoever.
08:41 Like, why are you even here, Tiffany Haddish?
08:43 Is the only reason you're in the movie because you supported Will Smith after the slap?
08:48 Is that why you're here?
08:49 There's a lot of Fast and Furious DNA that seems to be dripping into the franchise,
08:55 especially because there's such a large cast of characters.
08:58 We've also got Ammo brought back in this movie as well,
09:01 who was introduced in Bad Boys for life.
09:03 So, again, we get Vanessa Hudgens and Alexander Ludwig.
09:06 Noticeably absent in this outing, though, is Charles Melton,
09:10 presumably because he jumped ship so he could do May/December.
09:14 But this extended cast of characters, call them family if you will,
09:19 does threaten to maybe pull too much of the focus away from Smith and Lawrence,
09:23 which has always been the heart and focus of these Bad Boys movies.
09:28 I know that they're getting older, they can't carry all of it,
09:32 and I know that some of the action has been delegated to them
09:34 because Lawrence especially maybe struggles with doing the big action set pieces.
09:39 But even so, it does feel like there's perhaps too much going on around the characters
09:45 instead of just focusing on the central pairing.
09:48 The Bad Boys movies have never been known for great villains,
09:50 going all the way back to the first film which squandered Chucky Cario,
09:54 and Eric Daines McGrath doesn't break that cycle.
09:57 Sure, he's a nasty piece of work, especially in his introductory scene,
10:01 and he's a ruthless antagonist, but he's also not especially memorable.
10:05 They give him a backstory about the fact that he was tortured
10:08 and how that twisted him, but that doesn't really flesh out his personality all that much.
10:14 And the henchman he presides over are just generic can fodder.
10:17 None of them are given any kind of distinctive traits,
10:20 so that when they pop up at the end of the movie, you go,
10:22 "Yeah, I want that guy to get what's coming to him from Will Smith or whoever."
10:26 You know, that stuff is satisfying in an action movie,
10:29 but they still don't do it in this entry.
10:32 The casting also doesn't help with the predictability of the plot.
10:35 At points, there is one character that the second they walk on screen virtually,
10:40 you go, "I'm pretty sure that person's a turncoat."
10:43 And yeah, it turns out that is the case,
10:45 because that actor has pretty much been typecast as that role by this point.
10:50 You know that that character is going to turn out to be a bad guy,
10:54 and yeah, sure enough, it isn't that much of a twist.
10:58 However, this is an action movie, so the plot doesn't always matter.
11:01 The real question is, does it entertain?
11:04 And the answer is, yes.
11:06 I was stupidly entertained by Bad Boys Ride or Die.
11:09 Yeah, it is filled with absurd logic and plot holes,
11:13 but I was also having a lot of fun.
11:15 Lastly, because Smith and Lawrence's chemistry,
11:18 that still is what is carrying these movies.
11:21 They have great comic timing between each other,
11:24 and they know how to play off each other.
11:26 And you can definitely see this in the continuing gag of Reggie from Bad Boys 2,
11:31 played once again by Dennis McDonnell,
11:33 who literally only appears in Bad Boys movies.
11:37 They keep bringing him back, solely to keep referencing this bit over and over again.
11:42 He's great at being a straight man foil for them,
11:46 just standing there with his almost inscrutable face.
11:49 But at least in this movie, they actually expand upon it a bit more,
11:52 because he's a Marine, and so he gets an entire moment to shine,
11:56 which is a bit of a crowd pleaser.
11:59 And yeah, go on Reggie!
12:01 There's actually a bit of a reversal of Smith and Lawrence's usual dynamic in this movie,
12:06 in that Smith's Mike, he's usually the ladies' man.
12:09 He's the one that kind of throws himself recklessly into the action,
12:13 but this time he's actually settling down.
12:15 He gets married at the beginning of the movie to Mellie Labarde, who is Christine,
12:19 who is a physical therapist that was supposedly working with him
12:23 when he got shot in the third movie.
12:25 Although actually, she's a new character that again is presented like someone
12:29 that we were supposed to know about previously.
12:32 That character largely exists for you-know-what to happen,
12:36 but of course he's also aware of that.
12:38 So Mike spends a lot of the movie getting anxiety attacks.
12:41 He's in the middle of action sequences,
12:43 and then suddenly he finds himself struggling to reload his gun,
12:48 kind of struggling to take decisive action in those moments,
12:52 in a way which is uncharacteristic for Mike.
12:55 And I do think that Smith, despite the fact that he has weathered a lot of recent controversy,
13:01 it does feel like going back to Bad Boys, you know,
13:04 one of the franchises that made his name in the 90s,
13:07 he's firmly back on comfortable territory here.
13:10 Perhaps the biggest surprise of Ride or Die is that Martin Lawrence
13:14 actually steals a surprising amount of this film.
13:16 I know, what year is it?
13:19 He's more galvanized in this than I've seen him in decades,
13:22 and that's especially surprising because in the last film,
13:24 it looked like he was struggling to keep up.
13:27 He looked like Danny Glover circa Lethal Weapon 4,
13:31 where he really was too old for this shit,
13:33 and they were kind of riffing on that fact he was wearing glasses.
13:36 And Smith was doing much of the heavy lifting in all the action sequences,
13:41 while Lawrence was contemplating retirement,
13:43 both in character and seemingly out of it.
13:46 Whereas here, he's given so much more to do.
13:50 He has a heart attack at Mike's wedding very early on,
13:53 which sparks an entire bizarre subplot throughout the entire movie,
13:58 because he has a vision where he meets Joe Pantoliano's Captain Howard in the afterlife,
14:03 who is surprisingly calm, uncharacteristically so,
14:07 telling him, "It's not your time."
14:10 And the fact they brought back Pantoliano in a quite prominent role in the film's plot,
14:14 despite being killed off in the last entry,
14:17 he pops up in videos that he recorded before his death,
14:21 and in these vision sequences,
14:22 it almost feels like a tacit admission that,
14:25 yeah, it was kind of a mistake to kill his character off.
14:28 I'm always down for a bit of Joe Pantoliano,
14:31 but this is a really weird setup.
14:34 The video thing I could kind of get behind,
14:36 but the vision thing is like this weird recurring gag,
14:40 riffing on the fact that the character is so stressed,
14:44 and then in the afterlife, he's just completely benevolent.
14:48 And then, towards the end of the movie,
14:50 even Mike gets a vision of Captain Howard telling him,
14:53 "It's not your fault. It's not your fault."
14:56 Mike didn't even go to the afterlife!
14:58 Why is he suddenly getting visions from Captain Howard
15:01 telling him to calm down and just kind of chill out?
15:05 What is happening in this precise moment?
15:07 It's absolutely bonkers!
15:09 But going back to Martin Lawrence's Marcus,
15:12 this sets up a whole strand where Marcus feels like he cannot die.
15:16 He feels like he's invincible,
15:18 and this feels like a strange riff on that movie Fearless.
15:22 Do you remember that from way back in the day?
15:25 You know, with Jeff Bridges dancing on the edge of the building?
15:27 Martin Lawrence literally homages that moment.
15:30 He's up in his hospital gown, flashing his bits in his ass at people,
15:34 feeling like he can't die
15:35 while Mike is trying to talk him away from the edge of the building.
15:39 And throughout the entire film, Marcus is throwing himself into gunfights.
15:44 He's walking into traffic.
15:45 He is completely without abandon whatsoever.
15:50 He is totally away from the sort of, say, family man image
15:54 that we normally have this character in these movies.
15:58 And I think that Lawrence, given the chance to play something so different,
16:02 he's leapt at the chance
16:04 because there's so many comic opportunities that are offered up to him.
16:07 But Marcus's son turned towards spirituality
16:10 as the kind of banter between Lawrence and Smith,
16:13 especially when Marcus is going on with all this stuff about,
16:17 "Oh yeah, our souls have been bonded together.
16:19 I met your soul, Mike, and it didn't have a penis."
16:22 And Mike definitely was like, "No, it definitely did. It definitely did."
16:27 It really plays up the kind of homoeroticism between the pair of them.
16:31 It feels like a kind of post-Hot Fuzz kind of self-awareness
16:35 of the kind of buddy cop movies.
16:37 But also it just feels like Lawrence is just happily riffing
16:42 on the just crazy stuff that's being given in the scripts.
16:45 He gets an entire monologue that I'm pretty certain must be heavily improvised,
16:49 where he talks about how in a previous life,
16:52 Mike was a donkey that he owned.
16:55 It's really bizarre, like just goes completely out of nowhere.
16:59 We never saw anything like this in the Vision Quest sequence whatsoever.
17:02 But he's pulling all this stuff completely out of his ass.
17:05 It should feel like something that could get really annoying very quickly,
17:08 but actually the running gag works.
17:11 It's surprisingly funny, and Lawrence seems like he's just having absolutely great time.
17:16 And then there are the action sequences,
17:18 which Adolin Blau absolutely direct the hell out of.
17:21 They're very much evoking a lot of what Michael Bay did in the first two movies,
17:25 making sure the look is very visually consistent with what he did.
17:29 But at times, I think they do Michael Bay better than Bay himself does.
17:34 Yeah, Bay has those kind of unusual camera angles,
17:37 which they're emulating in this movie.
17:40 You've got moments where you've got the POV of Marx's watch, and Bay does that.
17:45 But in his movies, especially his later ones,
17:48 he very much diverts into that kind of "fucking the frame" style, as he likes to call it,
17:52 where every single setup, every single shot,
17:56 needs to be as flashy and as stylistic as possible for maximum impact.
18:01 But the problem is, when you do that near constantly, nothing has impact.
18:07 You need breathing room, you need room for the audience to settle down.
18:11 And I think that Adolin Blau, they know that in their direction.
18:15 So when the action sequences do arrive, that's where all the inventive camera stuff happens.
18:20 And when the story needs to be told, they're not hypercutting every three seconds
18:25 to make sure the audience is engaged.
18:27 It's a decent balance of making sure that it stays close to Bay's style,
18:32 while still having their own directorial stamp on the material.
18:36 If you've been on Twitter in the last couple of days,
18:37 you might have seen the behind-the-scenes of them filming the gun cam stuff.
18:41 Near the end of the movie, there's a point where we get the POV from Mike's gun
18:44 as he's firing away at the bad guys.
18:47 And then Will Smith, who's carrying the camera on his body,
18:51 twists it around so we get this wide-angle close-up from the POV of the gun facing Mike.
18:57 And then he tosses the gun over to Marcus, and we get the same thing with Martin Lawrence.
19:02 Shows a lot of imagination, even in the staging of an action set piece
19:05 in the fourth entry of a 30-year-old franchise.
19:09 Adderall and Blau definitely know how to make their action stand out,
19:14 make it feel dynamic, but feel motivated by what is happening in it.
19:19 Likewise, the action sequence on the plane is also very well done,
19:23 despite some maybe wobbly CGI towards the crash landing part.
19:27 But still, that is a big set piece with a lot of variables going on on screen.
19:33 But it's actually communicated very well to the audience, and it's really exciting.
19:38 This is big, silly action done right.
19:41 You know, I'm a simple man sometimes.
19:43 When you introduce an alligator named Duke in your finale,
19:47 with the implicit understanding that everyone in the audience knows
19:51 that some sucker is going to get eaten by the alligator at some point,
19:55 call it Chekhov's alligator, if you will,
19:58 and then you fulfil that promise, I want to stand up and cheer.
20:02 For me, Bad Boys Ride or Die successfully feels like a throwback
20:06 to those big, over-the-top 90s action movies.
20:09 It has that kind of crowd-pleasing mix of humour and action
20:13 that you expect from the Bad Boys franchise.
20:16 Smith and Lawrence are still clearly committed.
20:19 They're still bringing their A-game to all this.
20:22 It would have been very easy for them to just pick up the paycheck here.
20:26 But they clearly have a lot of affection for the franchise that made their name.
20:31 And I also think that, given all the machismo and the gunfire,
20:35 at its centre, it's surprisingly sweet because of the camaraderie between them.
20:40 There is something quite sincere about it,
20:44 even with all the goofiness that's going on around them.
20:47 Now, I do have to ask myself the question,
20:50 and this is going to be a really controversial statement, I can tell.
20:53 I don't care at this point. It's honestly how I feel.
20:57 I genuinely think that the Adeline Blau third and fourth films
21:01 might actually be better than the first and second ones that Michael Bay directed.
21:06 I know, I am going to get absolutely demolished in the comments,
21:09 but I stand by that opinion.
21:11 I think that they're better movies than the Michael Bay ones.
21:16 But whatever your taste, I think that if you like the Bad Boys franchise,
21:20 this definitely is a satisfying hit of nostalgia,
21:24 even if, again, it's perhaps rehashing a bit too much from its past.
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