Monday, January 18, 2016

Review: Ride Along 2

by Adam Riske
Goddamn it!

I had a very difficult time watching Ride Along 2. I went to see it on Saturday morning and walked out after 40 minutes to look at posters in the lobby. The movie is so mindless, half-assed and pathetic (it’s barely a movie in that it tells a story) that everything in my body was telling me to get up and leave. I knew I was reviewing this movie so I returned to my seat about 5 minutes later. Then at the 70 minute mark I left for good. I couldn’t take it anymore. I went home and took a nap.

When I woke up from my nap I started to feel guilty. I couldn’t review the movie because I didn’t see major portions of it but I felt bad, like I didn’t give Ride Along 2 a fair shake. So I grabbed my gift card and went to a different theater (I couldn’t brave the chance of a movie theater employee recognizing me from the morning and thinking I was returning to Ride Along 2) and forced myself to sit and watch this movie in its entirety. I just wanted you to know I put a lot of effort into this review.
This movie is bad. Really, really bad. The most infuriating thing about this is that Kevin Hart is a big star in the world of movie comedy. He could pick a better script than this if he really wanted to but he didn’t. It’s cynical bullshit that feels phoned in and delivered to an unsuspecting audience of supposed Kevin Hart fans. They deserve better.

The plot in brief: They didn’t try so neither will I. It’s a buddy cop movie.

The key ingredient of a buddy cop movie is if you like (or at least are interested in) the buddy cops. In the case of Ride Along and Ride Along 2 (which is worse than the original, if you can even imagine that), I did not. Ice Cube is fine but he’s playing the straight man detective to Kevin Hart’s wacky rookie cop and all Ice Cube really does is scowl and dispense the occasional put-down. We’re almost not designed to like Ice Cube’s character because he’s such a stick in the mud. That could be forgivable if we like Kevin Hart’s character, but I, at least, do not. He’s so incompetent that it stretches the realm of disbelief in accepting that any police force would allow him to work for them.
Hart’s antics are so tired to me at this point in his movie career. He just mugs and mugs and mugs, riffing one under-thought idea after another until you just want him to go away and leave you alone. Irritating doesn’t begin to describe Kevin Hart in the Ride Along movies. If that wasn’t bad enough, movie poison Ken Jeong co-stars, as does Oliva Munn (who can’t act to save her life). Almost everywhere you turn in Ride Along 2 is a new worse option for spending your time. This is a movie that doesn’t care about the dreams or inner life of its characters at all, so why should I? This is a movie that would much rather bask in the humiliation of its chess pieces.

I say “almost everywhere” because there are two good things about Ride Along 2 and that is the cinematography and the performance by Benjamin Bratt as the film’s (I can’t believe I just wrote the word “film” in reference to Ride Along 2) villain. Bratt is charismatic and seems to be having a lot of fun with his character and the movie is set in the beautiful and cinematic city of Miami, so every shot is at least beautiful to look at. So, I guess Ride Along 2 could have been worse (but probably not).
I apologize for making this review more of a rant than anything, but I have to in order to describe the way it made me feel. It’s so aggressively lazy and stupid that I felt constantly insulted as a viewer. This is a movie that hates its audience, denying them of humor, story and appealing performance. It bugs me on almost every fundamental level as a reviewer. The filmmakers have no respect for their audience’s intelligence during this movie. I can’t think of a worse use of your time at a theater this weekend than seeing Ride Along 2. Oh, and don’t get me started about the musical score of this movie…AAAAAGGHHHH!

Generally I have a rule with reviews not to be toxic, unkind, ungenerous, poisonous, or show a lack of charity, but that was all before I saw Ride Along 2. It has to be hard to make a movie this bad. It just had to be entertaining and in that it completely fails. Ride Along 2 is dreadful. I hate this shit!

13 comments:

  1. And yet there's an audience that will totally love this movie, as evidenced by the 34 million dollar opening weekend. I don't get it. I was getting upset when people were laughing at the trailers for it. I'm sorry you had to sit through it.

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  2. Thanks for taking one more for the team, Adam. How does it compare to the typical Happy Madison production?

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    1. It's a bit better than most Happy Madison productions.

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    2. Last week I saw the aggressively unfunny trailer in front of the very wonderful and sometimes pretty funny "Creed". There was not a single laugh from the audience during that trailer.

      Every time I read a review like this, I´m very happy about my decades old decision to avoid nearly all movie comedies. I just can´t stand to sit in a theater for two hours to come away with one or two half assed jokes that work on me. If you ask me, most of those "funny" movies suck.

      From time to time I watch some of those at home, usually stopping right in the middle because of finding them seriously unfunny.
      And it´s not that I have no humor but it seems like I find things way funnier when they happen in a movie that´s not primarily going for laughs or is labeled as a comedy.

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    3. I have the same and it generally serves me well

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  3. I can't imagine watching this movie after seeing the first one. And you sat through it one and a half times? That just sounds like torture to me. I think I'm done with Kevin Hart movies. He's a funny guy who somehow manages to make aggressively unfunny comedies. It's baffling.

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  4. I work at a theater, and I went on my break to watch 15 minutes of whatever. So I ask my coworker what to go watch, and as a joke I told her I'd watch whatever she said no questions, so she said RIDE ALONG 2. We were friends before that.

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  5. Is there a worse time of year than the January-February time period for movies? I'd say possibly the last week of August/first week of September. Still, the beginning of the year really is a scrap heap for the most part.

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  6. You should have seen 13 Hours. It's actually quite good. Much better than American Sniper.

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    1. 13 hours was good. Best Bay film in a while.

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    2. I'll get around to seeing 13 Hours soon. I've heard good things.

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  7. Ride Along 2 stunk. It wasn't funny and the story was terrible. All the would be funny parts were shown in the trailer. Speaking of the trailer. Tyrese would have been a nice cameo had that not of spoiled that in the trailer. Ride Along 1 was at least watchable and had a story that half way made sense.

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    1. Yeah, I would have much rather watched a cop movie with Ice Cube and Tyrese the whole way through.

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