Ride Along 2 | Little White Lies

Ride Along 2

22 Jan 2016 / Released: 22 Jan 2016

Words by Clarisse Loughrey

Directed by Tim Story

Starring Ice Cube, Kevin Hart, and Tika Sumpter

Two men holding guns, one wearing a yellow shirt and hat, the other a beige shirt.
Two men holding guns, one wearing a yellow shirt and hat, the other a beige shirt.
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Anticipation.

Will Ice Cube once more manage to sneak in the line ‘Today was a good day?”

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Enjoyment.

No. Probably because he’s realised it’s more of a middling day.

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In Retrospect.

Middling is far more preferable than comedy’s usual nastiness, though.

Kevin Hart and Ice Cube pick up where they left off in this bland bud­dy com­e­dy sequel.

Ride Along 2 is Ride Along with all the biki­ni mod­els mas­sive box office suc­cess can afford. Pock­et $154.5m on your first out­ing, and your sec­ond will sure­ly rel­ish trans­plant­i­ng its action from the streets of Atlanta to the glis­ten­ing beach­es of Miami.

It’s a plea­sure best con­densed into the sight of fresh­ly grad­u­at­ed cop Ben Bar­ber (Kevin Hart) step­ping out into the city’s heat, and towards promis­es of bust­ing open the city’s drug deal­ing net­work, dressed entire­ly in white linen. His future broth­er-in-law and fel­low cop James (Ice Cube) may not seem so impressed, but as he whips out his arms to exclaim he’s only one breeze away from a’90s P Did­dy video, you get some sense of this film’s own sort of gid­di­ness at its own suc­cess. The Ride Along series has tru­ly arrived.

It’s big­ger, it’s flashier. Yet, also, exact­ly the same. For self-ascribed come­dies, both Ride Along films are pecu­liar in their con­sis­tent, con­fi­dent absence of actu­al jokes. It’s not that Ride along 2 isn’t explic­it­ly unfun­ny; it’s with­out a sign of those men­tal crick­ets set chirp­ing at the writhing dis­com­fort of hear­ing gag after gag fall flat on its face. There’s just sim­ply, quan­tifi­ably, a max­i­mum of two jokes in this film. Two moments that have the weight and feel of some­thing that you could look to and say, hey, that’s a joke.

The rest is entire­ly pop­u­lat­ed with moments described only as the pre­ludes to jokes. The first build, the first lit­tle inklings that humour is on the hori­zon, before the big dad­dy punch­line inevitably drops its load on the audi­ence. It’s a film that elic­its soft, lit­tle chuck­les, and lit­tle else. A lengthy sequence sees an infor­mant (Kevin Jeong) insist that Ben per­form a series of tasks to prove he’s trust­wor­thy. He dash­es here, he dash­es there, only for that elab­o­rate pre­lude to cul­mi­nate in a demand that he eats some nachos he found in the trash. And that’s it.

Still, as deprived of humour as it may be, Ride Along 2 is also pleas­ant­ly, stub­born­ly watch­able. Maybe it’s reflec­tive of the wider state of com­e­dy cin­e­ma, where humour is so often dri­ven into the dirt by its own mali­cious­ness, that this film seems wor­thy of atten­tion sim­ply for pre­sent­ing char­ac­ters with inter­ests out­side of humil­i­at­ing each oth­er. Indeed, there’s lit­tle need to rev­el in nas­ti­ness when there’s so much assur­ance to be had in the rig­or­ous­ly defined per­sonas of your leads. In Kevin Hart’s mania ver­sus Ice Cube’s gruff, cin­e­ma short­cuts to the basic fact that every­one loves to watch a kit­ten clam­ber all over a Great Dane.

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