REVIEW: ‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’ Is A Feature-Length TikTok

What is the difference between a movie and a TikTok?  Besides a noticeable difference in runtime, both rely on personalities or celebrities to generate interest, capitalize on recent trends to increase their outreach, and depend on word of mouth or “shares” to keep them relevant. It’s a line further blurred by the Adil & Bilall’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die, a feature-length TikTok masquerading as a film.

It’s an experience built for non-existent attention spans, full of chopped-up, meme-able moments that hope to pad out a plot that’s more suggested than fulfilled. Bad Boys: Ride or Die is micro-content that’s ballooned way past its terminal point, subsisting off influencer cameos, feigned comedy, and gimmicky action that we can only hope to scroll through quickly.

Will Smith returns to the franchise that transformed him from a sitcom actor to a bonafide movie star. The Miami cop duo of Mike Lowry (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) are faced with another explosive, bullet-riddled investigation. When their late Captain Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano, in a mostly web-cammed performance) Is posthumously accused of working with the cartel, the two set out to prove his innocence. In the process, they too are turned into fugitives and forced to work outside the law to solve the case.

Like the franchise it’s a part of, Bad Boys: Ride or Die runs on fumes from the moment it starts, quickly devolving into a flurry of product placements and establishing shots of Miami skylines. Like the social media content it’s siphoned from, no one frame is free of an exaggerated background score and a sickly amount of overexposure and overediting. Each frame floods the senses, using anything and everything to elicit the bare minimum of a response. Yet, none of it can hide how unambitious and contextless it all feels, unfolding like a glorified direct-to-video installment that awkwardly attempts to fit around previous outings.

Its haphazard filmmaking approach unsurprisingly seeps into its lazy character writing. Mike is labored with panic attacks that threaten to derail the investigation, but we’re never shown why he’s experiencing them. The same goes for why Mike’s estranged, cartel-associated son, Armando (Jacob Scipio) feels an obligation to help him, or how the duo puts together the pieces of the investigation (all we’re given is a handy timelapse). At each turn, Bad Boys: Ride or Die feels as uninterested in the plot as the audience, speeding towards its next clickable moment. The film even namedrops “9/ll” as a plot point, mimicking social media’s obsession with the tragedy.

Yet, the meat of a Bad Boys movie lies in its ludicrous action, but here it’s markedly undercooked. The film’s steady stream of cameos and meandering gags coalesce in low-impact set pieces. Rife with a healthy dose of shaky cam and shoddy computer effects, even the most outrageous action sequences are left diluted by the number of gimmicks littered across them.

Its promising climax, centered around a gigantic albino alligator, quickly devolves into a first-person shooter before ending on a criminally unfunny punchline: “It’s like redneck Jurassic Park in here!” It’s all emblematic of a poorly thought-out TikTok sketch, sorely reliant on the diminishing goodwill of the personalities that populate it.

Smith’s fourth turn as Mike is less of a performance and more of a public relations exercise, focused on showing his relatable and charismatic personality. It reaches new heights when Smith is slapped not once but four times in a row. We can forgive him now, right? Lawrence is the film’s sole saving grace, barely holding the experience together. He makes the most of a thinly written character, garnering huge laughs with his wildly expressive performance and an impeccably timed “motherfu**er.” The rest of the ensemble, featuring talents like Rhea Seehorn, does little to rise above set dressing.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die fails to accomplish what its earliest predecessors did best: entertain. Instead, it manifests as a film designed to be chopped up and shared on social media left to be seen on smaller and smaller screens as time drags on. Though Ride or Die can be easily dismissed as mindless popcorn entertainment, it represents a graver trend. The ultimate “TikTokification” of cinema, where the theatrical experience is superseded by a need to make the most clickable experience. Let’s hope that time is as far away as the next Bad Boys installment.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is in Theatres June 7, 2024.