The fourth Bad Boys runs on Martin Lawrence and a handful of well-built set pieces. Around them Chris Bremner and Will Beall have piled a corruption plot, a prison break and a family reunion that nobody on screen seems to care about, and neither did we.
Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who took the series over with Bad Boys for Life (2020), bring Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett back for a fourth film, twenty-nine years after Michael Bay’s first. The premise is simple. Their late captain is accused of having been on the cartels’ payroll, clearing him means finding who arranged the evidence, and the search leads into their own department. Bad Boys: Ride or Die is loud, fast, sometimes funny and far too busy. It is worth an evening if you already like these two men.
Martin Lawrence is the reason to watch. Marcus has a heart attack in the first reel, has a vision while he is under, and comes back convinced he cannot die. Lawrence commits to this entirely: he strolls towards gunfire, lectures Mike on the universe, eats everything he has been told not to. We laughed more than we expected to and more than the writing deserved, and nearly all of it came from his timing, the half-second he leaves before a line so that everyone else in the scene has to wait for him. Smith has been written smaller. Mike now has panic attacks, a new wife in Christine (Melanie Liburd) and hardly any jokes, and Smith plays him carefully, as if the film would rather not draw attention to him.
The directors are good at the action, and better than they were. Robrecht Heyvaert’s camera rarely settles: it rides a drone through a gunfight, tumbles round the cabin of a plane going down, and for one sequence watches everything through a doorbell camera, which is the best idea in the film. The set pieces are clear. You can tell where everyone is and what they are shooting at, which was not always true under Bay. A firefight scored to Barry White is staged with real wit, and the helicopter sequence has weight. Jon Billington’s Miami is pastel by day and neon by night, and Janie Bryant puts Mike in suits and Marcus in whatever was nearest.
The trouble is everything between the set pieces. Chris Bremner and Will Beall’s script has a corrupt-police plot, a cartel plot, Mike’s imprisoned son Armando (Jacob Scipio), who alone can name the man behind it, a marshal (Rhea Seehorn) with a grudge, a smooth official called Lockwood (Ioan Gruffudd), Rita (Paola Nuñez) trying to run the department, and the two younger officers, Kelly (Vanessa Hudgens) and Dorn (Alexander Ludwig), to be fitted in somewhere. Eric Dane’s McGrath is the sort of villain who explains himself to the nearest camera. Somewhere around the hour we realised we had stopped trying to keep the factions apart, and that the film had been built so this would not matter. Asaf Eisenberg and Dan Lebental cut the exposition as fast as the action, which helps it go by and stops any of it landing.
Lorne Balfe’s score pounds under everything and the mix has been set for the largest room available; at home it can be turned down, and the film improves. The running gags are thin. Marcus’s immortality is funny the first three times and the script uses it a dozen. Tiffany Haddish arrives for one scene as Tabitha, does what Tiffany Haddish does, and is gone. Tasha Smith, as Marcus’s wife Theresa, gets the film’s one honest moment of worry and about a minute to play it.
The best joke is at the leads’ expense. Mike and Marcus stand back and let Dorn handle a fight, and for once the film admits how old its heroes are and is funnier for it. Set against the series, this is the easiest of the four to follow in a gunfight and the hardest to follow anywhere else. Bad Boys II (2003) was crude and often ugly and never in doubt about what it wanted. This one wants to be a buddy comedy, a conspiracy thriller, a family drama and a franchise, and is only sure of itself when Lawrence is talking.
The finale at an alligator park is happily silly and goes on about ten minutes too long. Watch it with someone who has seen the others; they can remember who Armando is for you. It runs 116 minutes and carries a 15.
