Ride Along 2
I’ve railed countless times against Hollywood’s grassfuckers and the way they squander their finite opportunities to make greatness on cranking out Ride Along 2s and other interchangeable commodities. Sometimes I wonder if they aren’t listening.
How many movies does the average director/writer/director get to make? Less than a handful, I’d guess. Say moviemaking was sex. Say you only get to screw three or four times in your entire life. Are you going to go, “Ahh, I’m sort of tired, so I’ll just do it missionary style this time and come quick so I can catch a rerun of Bewitched on the nostalgia channel?”
Fuck no. You have to make it count. You have to make it memorable, milk the rare experience for everything you can, get all Kama Sutra, tantric, whatever. Even if you don’t like the girl or boy you’re humping, you still have to make the most of the rare opportunity.
But Ride Along 2 is missionary-style; the laying on your back and thinking about wallpaper while you’re getting humped movie. This is the baking soda volcano at the science fair, the project that screams, “I have no ideas and I don’t fucking care.” It’s the enchilada platter at Casa Bonita where every ingredient came from a can and was slopped together by a pimply teenager.
This movie is slapped together from other bad movies and TV shows with bald-faced contempt for cleverness. It doesn’t bother to put a twist on anything. It might as well come with a checklist:
- Miami setting
- Exotic cars
- Smooth-talking but corrupt businessman
- Bad guys in black cars
- A cornball ticking timebomb – in this case, a cop who has to crack the case and get home in time for his wedding
- A sassy wedding planner
- Shootout in a fancy nightclub
- Tech nerd who cops must protect to crack the case
- A gruff, jaded detective teams with a overeager newcomer
- Gloria Estefan song (I shit you not)
- Showdown on the docks.
I could go on, but why? You get it. It’s soulless trash. It’s the sort of trash shameless assholes write (Phil Hay and Mat Manfredi) and other shameless assholes (Tim Story) direct, while money-hungry pricks hit their marks on screen. It’s garbage made by people who aren’t thinking about greatness or their audience, just the path of least resistance. Hurry up and get it over with because F-Troop is on after Bewitched.
O’Shea Cube and Kevin Hart play Atlanta cops James and Benjamin. James is the gruff, jaded one who reluctantly takes Ben as his excitable young partner. Ben’s easily excited sidekick who means well, makes mistakes and somehow does good in the end. Ride Along 2 is supposed to be a buddy cop comedy, but nobody made these two guys likable buddies, and nobody added jokes.
As the movie runs down its checklist it sets up what nobody in their right mind would think were either clever or funny scenarios. Hart chased by a CGI alligator, Hart running through backyards, and Hart saying that he wants to drive, he wants to drive, he wants to drive. Every time this turd has a quiet moment, its idea of comedy is the same: have Hart talk and not shut up. This might be funny if there were original words coming out, but there aren’t. He’s just fucking talking like a teenager on Adderal. I assume most of Hart’s rants were improvisational, because even the braindead pagehumpers who scribbled this garbage wouldn’t have written down all this drivel. That means that this shit was the best Hart could come up with, or it was all the director wanted.
Either way, it all adds up to a big old fuck you to the audience. O’Shea Cube and Kevin Hart fucked you fast while looking at their watches, and then rolled you into the wet spot. One Finger for Ride Along 2.