1 / 10
Why I Watched It
A couple of YouTube clips got me. They were short, loud and fun, and I thought the movie might be the same.
It isn’t. Bad Boys: Ride or Die is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I’d put it at the same level as Battlefield Earth, and if you know what I think of Battlefield Earth, you know how low that is.
I like Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. I liked the first Bad Boys, and I thought Bad Boys for Life brought the franchise back to life. This one is the worst movie I’ve ever seen either of them in, and I can’t think of a single good thing to say about it.
The Setup
The film picks up four years after Bad Boys for Life. Mike Lowrey, played by Will Smith, marries his physical therapist, Christine. At the reception, his partner Marcus Burnett, played by Martin Lawrence, has a heart attack and slips into a coma. He wakes up convinced he can’t die.
Meanwhile, somebody forces a Miami money launderer to move cartel money into the account of their late captain, Conrad Howard, and then has the launderer killed. The news reports Howard as a cartel man. Mike and Marcus set out to clear his name, with help from Mike’s son Armando, who’s in prison for Howard’s murder.
Before long the three of them are fugitives with a bounty on their heads, chased by the cartel, the police and Howard’s daughter Judy, a U.S. Marshal played by Rhea Seehorn. The man behind it all is James McGrath, a former Army Ranger turned cartel associate, played by Eric Dane. It all ends in a shootout at an abandoned alligator theme park.
That’s the whole movie. It runs 115 minutes.
The Plot Is Paper Thin
Strip it down and the story is a frame-up, a few clues and a race to the finish. Howard left video messages behind, the clues lead from one location to the next, and every location ends in a gunfight. There’s nothing under it. No mystery you can solve along with the characters, no turn you didn’t see coming, nothing that makes you lean forward.
Marcus’s heart attack is the closest the script gets to an idea. Marcus thinks he’s invincible, so he does stupid things, and the movie keeps cashing that joke in for the same laugh. It was thin the first time.
For Writers
A chain of locations isn’t a plot.
Clue leads to place, place leads to fight, fight leads to the next clue. That’s a structure for moving characters around, and it can fill two hours without ever giving the audience a reason to care what happens. A plot needs pressure that builds: choices that cost something, a problem that gets worse because of what the characters did, and a question the reader wants answered.
Look at your own outline. If every scene could be swapped with the one after it and nothing would break, you have a list of events. I walk through the fix in plot, pacing and story structure.
The Villain Is Terrible
James McGrath should be the reason the movie works. A former Ranger and DEA intelligence man who was captured by a cartel and came back working for them is a decent idea for a villain on paper.
On screen he’s nothing. He threatens people, kidnaps people and stands in a room looking dangerous. You never learn what he wants beyond money, and you never feel he’s smarter than the heroes. When he finally makes Mike choose between his wife and his partner, it should be the big moment of the film, and it lands flat.
His partner, the man inside the system feeding McGrath information, is just as thin. Once you see who he is, you’ve seen everything there is to know about him.
For Writers
A villain with a backstory still needs a want.
McGrath has a résumé: Ranger, DEA, captured, turned. What he doesn’t have is a desire the audience can feel, or a plan that tests the heroes. A villain works when he wants something specific, pursues it intelligently and forces the protagonist into choices he’d rather not make.
Give your antagonist a goal that makes sense from his side of the story. If you can’t write one scene from his point of view where his actions feel justified to him, he’s a prop. My piece on creating characters readers remember covers how to build one who isn’t.
Explosions Don’t Make a Movie
There are a few explosions, a few stunts, a helicopter crash and a big shootout at the old alligator park at the end. A couple of those scenes are the ones that looked good in the YouTube clips.
Out of context, they’re fun for a minute.
Inside the movie, they don’t land, because nothing around them matters. I didn’t care who survived the helicopter crash, and I didn’t care who won the gunfight at the theme park.
That’s the trap with a movie built from clips. Two minutes of a car chase on YouTube carries its own energy. Ninety seconds of it in the middle of a story you’ve stopped caring about is just noise.
For Writers
A set piece only works when the reader cares who comes out of it.
An action scene borrows all of its tension from the story around it. If the reader doesn’t know what the hero stands to lose in this particular fight, the fight is choreography. The same goes for a big argument, a storm or a courtroom showdown in a novel.
Before you write your biggest scene, write one sentence that says what changes for the character depending on how it ends. If you can’t, the scene isn’t ready, no matter how good it would look on its own.
The Editing and the Camera Work
Start with the editing. It’s terrible. Scenes cut away before they finish and cut back after they’ve lost whatever energy they had. The action is chopped so fast that it’s hard to follow who’s where.
The cinematography is awful too. Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the directors who did a good job with Bad Boys for Life, throw the camera everywhere: spinning, swooping and strapped to guns. It looks like somebody trying to make the movie feel exciting because the story isn’t doing it.
For Writers
Style can’t cover for missing stakes.
Flashy camera work is the film version of overwritten prose: exclamation points, fancy verbs and short punchy paragraphs piled onto a scene where nothing is at risk. Readers feel it the same way viewers do. The tricks call attention to themselves because there’s nothing else to look at.
When a scene feels flat, the fix is almost never more style. Ask what the character stands to lose, raise it, and then write the scene plainly. A strong scene survives simple prose. A weak one isn’t saved by fireworks.
Smith and Lawrence at Their Worst
The acting is terrible across the board. That includes the two stars. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are the whole reason anybody watches a Bad Boys movie, and here they’re at their worst. The banter that carried the first film feels forced. The jokes come on schedule and die on schedule.
I’ve watched both of these men for decades.
The worst I’ve ever seen either of them is right here, in the worst movie I’ve seen them make.
What made the first film work was friction. Mike was cool, Marcus was a nervous family man, and every scene pushed those two against each other. Here the friction is gone. They agree on everything, they joke about everything, and nothing between them is ever at risk.
For Writers
A partnership on the page runs on conflict, even between friends.
Two characters who agree on everything have nothing to talk about. The best buddy pairs want different things, see the same problem differently and annoy each other even while they’d die for each other. That friction is where the humor and the heart both come from.
If your two leads sound alike or never disagree, give one of them a goal the other thinks is wrong. You’ll get better dialogue out of it immediately.
Behind the Scenes
Sony announced a fourth film soon after Bad Boys for Life opened in January 2020, with Chris Bremner returning to write. Will Beall shares the screenplay credit. In April 2022, reports said development had been put on hold after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. Smith and Lawrence confirmed their return in February 2023, with Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah directing again.
Cameras rolled in Atlanta and Miami on April 3, 2023, stopped during the SAG-AFTRA strike that summer, and wrapped on March 4, 2024. Joe Pantoliano returned as Captain Howard, and Michael Bay, who directed the first two films, has a cameo as a Porsche driver.
The film opened in the United States on June 7, 2024, and topped the box office with $56.5 million. On a $100 million budget, it made about $405 million worldwide. Critics were split: 65 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes and 54 out of 100 on Metacritic. Audiences gave it an A minus CinemaScore, the first film in the series not to earn an A.
The money was there. The movie wasn’t.
Is Bad Boys: Ride or Die worth watching?
No. The plot is thin, the villain is terrible, the editing and cinematography are awful, and Smith and Lawrence are at their worst. There’s nothing in it of redeeming value. It sits next to Battlefield Earth at the bottom of my list.
If you want the real Bad Boys, watch the first film and Bad Boys for Life. I cover all four films in my Bad Boys franchise review, and my ranked action lists have plenty of buddy pictures that earn their explosions. If you only want the good scenes from this one, find them on YouTube. That’s where they belong.
- Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Wikipedia
