Bad Boys: Ride or Die

The Weight of the Badge, and the Baggage

I did not expect *Bad Boys: Ride or Die* to get me thinking about aging, panic, and mortality, but here we are. A *Bad Boys* ticket is usually a promise: fast cars in Miami light, explosions, gunfire in slow motion, and Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett talking over each other while everything behind them catches fire. The fourth film still serves that meal, but Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah also make it feel like a franchise waking up sore. More than once, this plays like an action movie staring down middle age. Oddly, that’s the best thing about it.

Adil and Bilall don’t treat the old Michael Bay grammar as sacred. They raid it. The spinning camera moves are still here, the honey-colored Miami glow is still here, but now the movie straps cameras to drones and tumbles them through the sky. The helicopter crash sequence feels like a first-person video game gone sideways. Beneath all that flash, though, the movie keeps checking in on its heroes’ bodies. Marcus drops from a major heart attack at Mike’s wedding and spends the rest of the film floating on post-near-death mania, convinced he can’t die. Mike, meanwhile, is blindsided by panic attacks. The swaggering gods of 1995 are pushing sixty now, and the film knows it.



There’s no avoiding the real-world context, either. This is Smith’s first big theatrical shot since the 2022 Oscars, and the movie plainly uses that baggage. He’s tighter here, less breezy, his confidence replaced by something frayed. When Mike locks up during a shootout and can’t breathe, it’s hard not to read the performance as carrying more than the script admits. Then Marcus slaps him—over and over—to shock him back into the moment. Maybe that lands as canny self-awareness, maybe it feels like naked image repair. I expected to hate it. Instead, it mostly works because the film acknowledges the crack in Smith’s star persona without trying to be too cute about it.

None of that matters if Mike and Marcus stop being fun together, and thankfully they haven’t. David Ehrlich wrote in *IndieWire*, "Despite everything that's crammed into this one, it's still nothing without Mike and Marcus." Exactly. Lawrence, who seemed tired in the last film, looks recharged here. Wandering around in hospital gear and anti-slip socks, muttering about destiny and previous lives, he brings a loose, deranged energy that Smith can play off beautifully. Their rhythm is still the franchise’s best trick.



The plot itself is paper-thin. Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) is dead, someone is trying to paint him as a cartel rat, and the conspiracy mostly exists to shove Mike and Marcus toward the next huge set piece. The villains barely register as people. They’re just scowls with guns. But procedural detail has never been the point of these movies.

What sticks is the stuff the directors stage with conviction. The standout is the home invasion sequence, where Reggie—Marcus’s mild, often-dismissed son-in-law, played by Dennis Greene—gets trapped in the house with his family as mercenaries crash in. The scene turns abruptly, wonderfully brutal. Reggie, a Marine, works through the attackers with knives, rifles, and terrifying calm. Adil and Bilall strip the comedy away and shoot it straight, which makes Mike and Marcus’s speechless reaction to the security footage later even funnier.



I don’t know how much longer this series can keep borrowing energy from 90s nostalgia before the strain shows for good. Sooner or later, "too old for this" stops being a punch line and just becomes true. For now, though, *Ride or Die* finds a sweet spot. It delivers the Miami shine and the mayhem, then lets a little weariness show through the cracks. It’s loose, overstuffed, and sometimes unexpectedly moving. I’ll take that over another antiseptic blockbuster any day.