The long-in-the-tooth Will Smith / Martin Lawrence buddy cops, 4-deep franchise, Bad Boys, offers fans highly digestible actioners with a tried-and-true formula -- sharp-shooter straight man (Smith), his mouthy sidekick (Lawrence) and irredeemably evil villains.
This formula has been a bonanza for both lead performers and quite likely anyone else attached to the series. Estimates are Smith earned about 40 million for the first three pictures; Lawrence a little over 30 million.
Michael Bay directed the first two films, and the latest entry -- titled Ride or Die -- was directed by the Belgian team Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. It continues with the narrative of 2020's Bad Boys For Life, also directed by Arbi and Fallah. In that picture, Smith's Lowrey and Lawrence's Burnett, special forces cops in Miami, lost their trusted and beloved C.O., Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano), in a botched operation.
In the latest film, Howard is posthumously accused of conspiring with the drug cartel his team had been investigating and in which Lowrey's son by a cartel operative, Armando (Jacob Scipio), was a key player and assassin. The Bad Boys mount up with their trusted team -- Kelly (Vanessa Hudgens) and Dorn (Alexander Ludwig) -- to find the evidence needed to clear Howard's name.
Predictably, the quest for answers leads to a string of bad cops and worse politicians, multiple chases using all manner of conveyance, enough explosions to level Miami, and messy romantic and familial entanglements. As a nod to the not-incidental age of this series, Ride or Die contains some ruminations on mortality and vulnerability, although neither Lowrey nor Burnett suggests retiring, as they had previously.
That's probably welcome news to millions who revel in the pictures' hood rat sensibilities (a spicy cameo by Tiffany Haddish as the operator of a strip club seems an odd casting choice considering her real-world travails), Lawrence's unhinged lunacy and Smith's stoic swagger.
Not bad.
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