The moment I got into my car I started playing N.W.A. in order to cleanse Ice Cube’s sins from being in this movie.
“Ride Along 2” is the brilliantly titled sequel to 2014’s “Ride Along,” and features Kevin Hart and Ice Cube returning as “Kevin Hart and Ice Cube as cops” brothers-in-law. This time around the duo heads to Miami in order to take down a drug lord (Benjamin Bratt). Tim Story returns to direct.
The first “Ride Along” wasn’t an *awful* film, but it was number 10 on my 2014 worst list because it was so unfunny and relatively boring. However compared to this sequel, the first film is a comedy buddy cop goldmine.
The script of this movie has such bottom-denominator and barrel-scrapping humor that adds yawns to an already stale plotline. Pretty much every joke is about Kevin Hart’s height, Olivia Munn looking like a man (which, no?) or some random reference that doesn’t make sense (like a character yelling “hey, Hurt Locker!” at a gunman). The few chuckles, and chuckles may be too generous a term, smile is more like it, come from Ice Cube’s facial expressions, or lack thereof.
As for Kevin Hart, he has arguably made two good comedies in his career, “Wedding Ringer” and “Think Like a Man,” and what those two films have in common are he plays a toned-down version of himself; he isn’t running around screaming. Well in “Ride Along 2” Hart is back on his run-and-scream grind and after the first five minutes it wears out its welcome (and there’s still 95 minutes left to endure after that).
Oh, and let’s talk about that 101 minute runtime. When the credits began and the lights came up my friend and I turned to each other and said, “So, like, that felt like three hours, right?” It really is so boring and so uneventful and so not funny that it just drags along to a merciful end.
Speaking of the end, I will give the film props because the final five minutes of the film are actually genuinely funny, and act as a saving grace; but that saving grace comes in the form of a bullet to the head saving the audience from the painfully not entertaining film they had just endured. With some fast editing and banter, those final minutes made me wish and wonder what the whole film could have been like had it been like that (likely still not good, but surely better).
“Ride Along 2” isn’t aggressively awful like “Fantastic Four,” but there aren’t enough laughs to be considered a success as a comedy or enough thrills to work as a cop movie. It is nothing more than a cash grab by the studio, and while it has already faded from my memory (a mere two hours later), I am almost certain I will be talking about this film again in December…when I write my list of 2016’s worst films.
Critics Rating: 3/10
Variety