Bad Boys: Ride or Die, as a “more of the same” companion to 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, has proven that this is a franchise determined to age gracefully. As much as a series in which Will Smith and Martin Lawrence play Miami detectives huffing the red, white, and blue fumes of bullet-ridden, nihilistic maximalism actually can, I suppose.
Truthfully, Ride or Die has less to say about the state of masculinity, action cinema, and Smith’s onscreen legacy than it does about Warner Bros’s embarrassing decision to shelve its directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s take on DC’s Batgirl for an easy tax write-down. A little self-awareness goes a long way, and, under the duo’s guidance, the Bad Boys movies have comfortably reached an equilibrium between parody and nostalgic sentiment. A punch-up in an art gallery, a helicopter pan of the city, and a shot of Lawrence drooling over a day-old convenience store hot dog all yearn to achieve the same hedonistic chaos as Michael Bay’s original instalments, released in 1995 and 2003, respectively.
