The Bikeriders – a cool rider, but it didn’t floor me

The Bikeriders, like Furiosa, understands the raw power and coolness of a bunch of people revving motorcycles to intimidate enemies. Inspired by real people and events, and based on a book by photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyons, it is also a film which seems to draw heavily from The Wild One (the motorcycle club was formed in part as a response to one of the characters watching the film) and the idea of a rebel without a cause or a care. Johnny (Tom Hardy doing another incredible voice) is the aging family man leader of an outlaw motorcycle club that finds itself going through a rocky transitionary period between 1965 and 1973 as expansion, urban economics, and the effects of the American War in Vietnam reshape the world they live in. Austin Butler is Benny, the handsome, quiet rebel at the center of the film, who wants nothing more in life than to ride motorcycles, hang with his boys, and take on challengers. Jodie Comer’s Kathy carries the film as narrator and primary subject protagonist (where Johnny and Benny, with opaque interiority, become objects). Because she is the central interviewee for the journalist character, most of the film is through her eyes, and that which she did not see illustrates points which reflect her perspective.

Austin Butler has relatively few lines, so we don’t get any overwhelming insights into his personhood beyond what we can see in his actions. Benny is introduced when Kathy shows up the Vandals biker bar hideout so her friend feels safe on a date at a party. Johnny introduces himself, says he’s the head honcho, says he won’t let anything happen to Kathy, dodgily answering “nothing” when she wonders what might have happened otherwise. Benny hardly says a word beyond introducing himself, ends up taking Kathy on a motorcycle ride, wind in her hair, exhilarated, and after partying until the early morning, he brings her home, where her boyfriend angrily and concernedly waits. Benny stands vigil on his motorcycle for upwards of twelve hours, Kathy’s boyfriend leaves, and she marries Benny within the week. This film is about the events that follow, the consequences of her getting wrapped into this life, or being adjacent to it as he’s drawn further in and the Vandals motorcycle club gets twisted up in the forces of history and the easy corruption that grows in an undisciplined organization or organism.

The Bikeriders is a film touched by but not explicitly engaging with structural forces, a valid choice but which provides a narrow scope of perception and expression. Steeped as it is in the homosocial – guys being dudes, dudes rocking, dudes hugging and punching and wrestling and showing skin – it also clings tightly and generously to the homoerotic. One of the main throughlines in the film which you can see from the first trailer is that Kathy and Johnny end up in conflict over Benny – fighting over his soul, romantic love versus love for your bros; the interior conflict for Benny about his path toward the future.

Where it may be most interesting is as a demonstration of contradictions at the heart of a certain era in the past of American fraternal organizations. The grit and grime of this depiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s is notable because it is in contrast to the parallel hippie counter culture of free-love which has become, in the minds of some and the depictions of many, ubiquitous as representative of the historical setting. At the same time, the Vandals jackets and vests are often dirty or have a makeshift quality to them; the fashion of the men is a bit grungy, a bit between comfort, showiness, and utility, somewhere on the stylistic continuum between the polish of a 1950s greaser and a 1970s rocker. The general lack (though not complete absence) of persons of color or explicit queer characters is another storytelling choice which in the past would be unremarkable but is here noteworthy not because it sets the film back but because it expresses the singularity of viewpoint. The world as the Vandals see and experience it is not cloistered but it is separated from conventional retrospective notions of what was happening at the time, same as the characters are separated from conventional mainstream life. When the Vandals go to a local car show and end up in a brawl with another motorcycle club, the camera does show us some diversity in the crowd showing off cars, they’re just not mostly people the protagonists interact with.

Irrespective of that, the fictionalized firsthand account of the transformation of the motorcycle club is interesting because of what it reflects in the wider world. Johnny started the motorcycle club because he was a bit restless in a relatively charmed working-middle class home life. He started a motorcycle racing club and then decided he wanted a motorcycle hanging-out club. He took on castoffs and outsiders from around town (his best friend Brucie, played by Damon Herriman, or Army reject Zipco played by Michael Shannon among them), eventually from as far afield as California (Boyd Holbrook as filthy-toothed mechanic Cal and Normand Reedus as even grosser Funny Sonny). His Vandals were outlaws but perhaps not villains, and then they expanded and things got beyond his ability to control. He keeps trying to foist leadership on the man who wants it least, the one who he thinks the old guys and the new guys would respect, a man so disgusted by how things develop at the club that he eventually disappears. There’s a young man, The Kid (Toby Wallace) who is at first a small character in the film and later a catalyst within it – he and his friends see the Vandals riding through town one day and set out to be like them. They try to gain entry to the club and are rejected when, as a test, The Kid is admitted on condition he abandon his friends, not realizing that turning the back on his boys is the worst thing he could do in front of Johnny. They eventually gain admittance to the Milwaukee club (whose founding proposed by Happy Anderson’s Big Jack was, in many ways, the beginning of the end of what Kathy calls “the golden age”) and the Kid challenges Johnny.

I don’t think The Bikeriders romanticizes outlaw motorcyclists the same way a show like Sons of Anarchy does, for instance. Even the notion of a slightly softer past to contemporary outlaw motorcycle clubs has a realistic twinge of failure, grime, and listlessness to it. At the same time, I wonder about double standards in how I apply this critique to art and media about lawbreakers as opposed to art and media about law enforcers. Twelve years ago on a different blog, I wrote about how Martin Scorsese gets a lot of gruff for making criminals look cool, specifically with respect to The Wolf of Wall Street. My main contention in his defense was that we develop a society which rewards certain kinds of bad behavior. That white college students watch The Wolf of Wall Street and then produce party rap songs called “Jordan Belfort” is not an indictment of Martin Scorsese; if anything, it’s an indictment of American legal and economic systems which make the suffering of countless scam victims seem a worthy price for a yacht or a Lamborghini. It isn’t writer-director Jeff Nichols’s fault that motorcycles are cool or that Danny Lyon did such a great job capturing them looking cool in photographs he and cinematographer Adam Stone would have live-action storyboards to work with.[1] Moreover, what movies like Scorsese’s gang pictures and The Bikeriders do is to show that sometimes things that look, feel, and sound cool lead to or are made of dark and desperate actions and events.

The Bikeriders succeeds in that. Where it fails is a general lack of momentum; the way Comer’s narration is written and performed feels real, but there’s a lack of punch in the storytelling, as if the transition between setting up the characters as documentary subjects and showing what the Vandals turned into is lacking the right lubricant. The inevitable tragedies feel even more inevitable than tragic and sometimes Kathy’s talking so fast in this gossipy recollection that it feels as if she’s just recounting a couple bad weekends. Nonetheless, it isn’t her performance that is lacking (she is really carrying the film) but the narrative and thematic composition which feels like it is missing some propulsion. The film is far from lifeless, but there is little in the way of profundity. There is also an attempted sexual assault which, while it doesn’t approach the level of harrowing of a Heaven’s Gate or Blonde, does effectively strike fear into audience members and convey the club’s lowered standards of behavior.

Kathy’s discussion of the behavior and hygiene of the men of the club and the women adjacent to it is informative of her character as much as of the period. Her perspective isn’t treated as objective, per se, but as the most “normal.” The distinction between the women she likes (Rachel Lee Kolis as Johnny’s wife Betty, Phuong Kubacki as Brucie’s girlfriend Gail) and doesn’t (some unnamed, alluded to other characters) informs the hierarchy of respectability she has internalized even as she embraces the club in its flaunting of society and then rejects what the band turns into.

In a way, The Bikeriders is the story of a guy who had a fun idea to hang out with his friends, dressed it up in the aesthetic of criminality and ended up ceding control to people that wanted bad and worse because that aesthetic required action. If you engage in brawls and burn down bars, you can hardly be surprised if your life ends at the barrel of a gun. And if you can’t make the right man succeed you as leader, the wrong man will, anymore than you can be surprised if the guy who picked you up by looking hot on a motorcycle struggles to walk away from that life until it becomes a matter of life and death.

Final Score: 3/5

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[1] Can’t stress enough how cool motorcycles are. Since Arnold in Terminator, Batman, the Power Rangers, and Grease 2. I haven’t ridden one in more than a decade and I’m, like, itching to take a class and get my license. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to flying.

Tuesday – on Death and Remembrance

Tuesday is a supernatural drama film about death and grief which centers on the experience of a terminally ill girl, Tuesday (played by Lola Petticrew) and her imploding mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Zora), as they meet Death, who comes in the form of a size-shifting deep-voiced macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene).

The film begins by introducing the audience to the bird who represents death by having it show up in people’s last moments – a younger woman, stabbed near a bus stop, an older woman, expiring on a couch as she watches TV, a man lying in an alley after he’s been mugged – you hear the voices of their thoughts, hurried and panicked and overlapping, the denial, the pain. Next, we meet Tuesday and her nurse Billie (who Zora has in her phone as “Nurse 8” and who is played by Leah Harvey); Tuesday’s life is one of constant pain and loneliness. As she deep-breathes through a panic attack, the bird appears near her, growing in size large enough to do his ritual of passing a wing over to send her beyond this world. She gets him to hesitate, asking to wait for her mother. He assents after she helps him with a panic attack from being overwhelmed by the voices of everyone’s pain and gives the soiled bird a bath. She calls her mom, who is fiddling the day away at coffee shops and on park benches but refuses to answer the phone for Tuesday or Nurse Billie. Tuesday and Death listen to old school hip-hop (he knows all the words to It Was a Good Day), she introduces him to weed (which makes him briefly paranoid), and they flip through pictures of old history books so she can get his opinion (apparently Stalin was a prick and Jesus was very sarcastic). When Zora finally returns home, she eventually does battle with Death, winning after convincing Tuesday she was making peace, ingesting the battered and burned bird, and throwing the world (already off-kilter because Death hasn’t been doing his job all day) into total chaos.

The film follows as Zora and Tuesday relish what little time they have left, as Zora deals with the fact that she has been neglecting her daughter because of the denial of losing her. Her own life has become chaos and she has liquified every small piece of property or material asset in an avoidant self-destructive frenzy to pay bills while she does not work. Eventually, Zora accidentally reveals she’s assumed Death’s powers by consuming him and carries Tuesday on her back while going around England resolving the chaos she had caused to erupt. On a country beach, she gags up the re-formed Death, having a silent confrontation with him and then a teary-eyed confession to Tuesday, who is understandably pissed off. We don’t learn the details of Tuesday’s exact diagnosis, but we know she is in constant pain and that her mother couldn’t let her go because she does not know who she is or what the world is without her. She makes her peace with this but is still a wreck.

Death eventually comes to visit to check on Zora, who has very little in the will to live. Death refuses to take her, communicating to Zora that, while there’s no God in “any human way,” that “the afterlife” is the legacy and memory of the people that have died, and how we honor it. It’s a moral lesson that overlaps with the cosmologies and mythologies that say that we live on as long as someone is keeping us alive in their minds. It is at once a somber and encouraging message. Our life is just as we live it, our afterlife just how we honor those who came to pass.

I found the film very emotionally arresting from the first moments – I was so, so angry with Zora. I do not have any children and I cannot imagine the pain of losing them but I can imagine very easily the pain of feeling like your parents do not want you or wish you were something or somewhere else. Parents don’t have to genuinely feel those things for children to incorrectly infer them, and abandoning your child to the misery of that sort of speculation because you aren’t there to comfort them in their dying moments is revolting. Nonetheless, it felt very human, this pain of not knowing how to deal with a dying child. We don’t learn anything about Tuesday’s father and we don’t get the details of what Zora’s life was like beforehand. We don’t need them; it is sufficient to infer she had some career and that she has not been able to manage it as she slowly watches her daughter’s life trickle away.

If you think too hard about the central metaphor, it can fall apart. If you believe that the bird is physically appearing to everyone who dies, it simply does not make logical sense that it would surprise anyone. If everyone who has ever died surrounded by loved ones had seen the bird, surely they would pass that along. All the people that shot someone in a firing squad, or surgeons that lost someone on an operating table, soldiers involved in acts of mass death, and so on. But that only belatedly occurred to me. Mostly I thought of it as a metaphor for someone wrestling with grief and, moreover, if it’s a supernatural bird born of a bottomless void; I imagine it can appear to whatever small or large amount of people in a crowd as it wishes to. Generally, I thought it would not land before I saw it and, for me, it landed.

Death as a Giant Bird worked well because the lighting, sound design, and camera work in his early appearances helps convey anxiety and fear. It gives the film a sense of drama, yes, but also suspense and nearly horror early on, a sense of dread conveyed. I don’t know every mythological, folkloric, or religious tradition about death’s personifications, but as a bird I tend to think crows, ravens, and vultures. A colorful macaws covered in dirt and grime because of long years of work, who has nearly lost his voice because no one ever calls him to use it (Everyone asks “How will Death feel for me?” but no one ever asks “How’s Death feeling?”) was sweet. The feeling that I got was that the bird acts as an image that is simultaneously comforting and so strange that it affords a sense of wonder as much as fear in those last moments.

I also think that there is a boldness in creating a film with a supernatural construction of death that still ends in an atheistic place. Over 80% of the world’s people have some formal religious identity. Of the less than 15% of people that do not, many still believe you go somewhere when you die. As much as this film has a call to action, it is to honor the memory of those that die.

For my part, over the last nine months, I have not infrequently felt a deep hope that there is something beyond this world. I have not believed in any such thing for about half of my life at this point. But I have seen so many Palestinian children’s corpses held by their mourning parents that I have from time to time hoped beyond hope that there is something more for the many innocents massacred; heaven, reincarnation, whatever. If – as I usually believe and the bird Death says – all we have is this life and how we remember people as their afterlives, we have a solemn duty to make up for the suffering we have allowed or enabled.

The necessity of death is a difficult thing to wrestle with, as is the point of the film. The brevity of our time on Earth is what gives our actions and inaction meaning. Even in accordance with the religious traditions I know something about, what you do here determines what you get there – reincarnation, Nirvana, with Ra or Osiris, Elysium, Valhalla, Heaven, or Hell – all comes from how you live this life.

Tonally, this is a dramatic film with a lot of lightness to it. The comedy that exists is primarily a consequence or expression of Zora’s stubbornness. There is common and macabre humor, moments of sarcasm, moments of intense darkness. Even not having seen all her work, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is one of my favorite actresses, from Seinfeld and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to Veep and last year’s You Hurt My Feelings. There are common threads in her performances from Elaine Benes to Selina Meyer and even Valentine Allegra de Fontaine in a couple of Marvel projects. I do not know if I have ever seen her so remarkably sad as in this film. Zora is a difficult but fully realized and empathetic character. This is the first I have seen Lola Petticrew and her conveyance of the sad, resigned, general lonely experience of being a dying young person apparently abandoned by all that once held her dear is touching. She is smart and defiant even in her apparent physical weakness. Leah Harvey, I sort of wish had more to do, but she is effective in her appearances, primarily as a counterpoint to Zora and Tuesday, especially effective while expressing the strange experience of dealing with the shock of a world full of the undead.

The most cinematographically interesting sequence is probably Zora and Tuesday traveling through the world ending life that should have already ended. The synth music alongside it gives it a spacey feeling, as do shots of the stars; the editing here giving a flow of time and space, giving the experience a mystical quality. The central special effect of the bird obviously contributes to the fablelike quality of the film, which I was worried would feel pat and trite but which felt like a marriage of old wisdom and modern experience. The film has an interesting temperament of both the grounded and otherworldly qualities of life and death. While its themes are familiar in some ways, Daina O. Pusić’s feature directorial debut, which they also wrote, is ambitious. I look forward to seeing what Pusić does next.

Final Score: 4/5

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is the best Propaganda Film I’ve Seen since Top Gun: Maverick

…or at least Godzilla: Minus One

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is the fourth movie in the Bad Boys franchise, the second after Morrocan-Belgian directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah helmed the series resurrection with 2020’s Bad Boys for Life.[1] The first two films (1995 and 2003) are staples of the Michael Bay canon, explosive R-rated action comedies starring Will Smith as sharp-dressing, loose cannon playboy cop Detective Mike Lowery and Martin Lawrence as his family man partner, Detective Marcus Burnett (they have since been promoted to Detective Lietuenant). The movies are about how challenging and rewarding it is to be a Miami Police Detective, through the practical effects and flare laden lens of Michael Bay’s (and his cinematographers Howard Atherton’s and Amir Morki’s, and now Adil & Bilall’s cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert’s) cameras, facing absurd exaggerations and personalizations of real-life problems. The title of the films comes from the song used as the theme for the TV show COPS (a reality documentary propaganda series that has been airing unceasingly in this country for 35 years), which Marcus and Mike have claimed as their own theme song. Joe Pantoliano plays Captain Conrad Howard, their exasperated supervisor in each of the first three films, dying in the 2020 movie and reappearing here through pre-recorded videos for a secret investigation into high-ranking government corruption that serves as the protagonists’ main quest. Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a competent action comedy, and stands out for that.

Bad Boys for Life had the buoyancy of being a legacy sequel. That is, you could speculate it was pre-invested with goodwill by people that either regarded the past movies fondly (lots of general audience members) or knew those movies were successful and thought they would be an easy bar to clear critically (lots of critics). That film did succeed, as El Arbi and Fallah directed a film which is clearly in aesthetic and thematic continuity with Bay’s movies (he has a cameo though he does not, as with the new Transformers films, serve as an executive producer) while adding their own artistic flare. There is a special camera rig used for some exceptionally cool first-person gunfighting in the third act, and they just generally like to use close shots for comedic effect or intensity in action, though from time to time I also found that action moved too quickly to effectively follow.

Like the last film, Bad Boys: Ride or Die starts with Mike and Marcus speeding in Mike’s Porsche toward an important event. In Bad Boys for Life, it was the birth of Marcus’s grandchild. This time, it is Mike’s wedding. In the last movie, Mike got shot outside a party celebrating Marcus’s grandson; this time, Marcus has a heart attack dancing during Mike’s wedding reception, leading to an early interesting visual sequence where he crashes through water when he hits the solid ground, having a sort of vision that alters his outlook on life, feeling at one with the universe and thinking he is unkillable. Their brotherhood, concepts of patriarchal nuclear and extended family, heteronormative ideas about maturity and reproduction, all resound throughout the film. It is not totally unlike the “family” motif of the Fast & Furious franchise, though better written, performed, and directed.

What separates the Adil & Bilall brand of Bad Boys from the Bay brand is that the jokes aren’t as mean and the depictions aren’t as much crass and paper-thin stereotypes, generally though not without exception. They still have fast car chases littered with explosions, captivating gunfights, and they do a great job of mounting tension and anticipation, creating spiking levels of thrills. Writers Chris Bremner and Will Beal also do a great job of having Mike and Marcus play off one other, creating space for their comedic chemistry. There is something about Lawrence’s delivery that feels like it’s *almost* lacking in the early going, but which produces great naturalistic and fluid moments.

The plot quickly progresses to a point where the late Captain Howard is framed as being connected to “the cartels” and the Bad Boys have to find the real bad guys and clear his name. Their own innocence is suspect because they were Howard’s guys and because Lowery has an illegitimate son that was a cartel hitman, the antagonist from the last film who they have to work with in this one (Guyanese-British actor Jacob Scipio as Armando Aretas). Joe Pantoliano is in this movie at least as much as he was in the last one, and he died in that. Mike and Marcus end up on the run after they’re framed for hatching Armando when they were planning to use him legally for information assisting with the case. Among those chasing them is Howard’s daughter, U.S. Marshal Judy Howard (Rhea Seehorn), among the thin characters that fill out the background.

Ioan Gruffudd, the handsome Welsh actor that played Mr. Fantastic twenty years ago, is district attorney and mayoral candidate Adam Lockwood, who we learn at Mike’s wedding is dating Rita Secada. Secada (Paola Núñez) dated Lowery off-screen sometime between the second and third film, is the former head of Miami’s technologically advanced “AMMO” unit, and succeeded Pantoliano as Captain. Possible romantic tension between Mike and Rita does not really exist here, which feels like a missed opportunity considering the value of their butting heads in the previous film, though perhaps there is value to showing men and women can be friends after their relationships fail.

On the other hand, so much of the character’s presence, and that of the characters she’s related to, is about supercop mythos which fictionally validates – and so psychologically conditions the audience to accept – the huge amounts of money we spend on law enforcement in this country instead of supporting social services which might prevent crime. It’s a movie which believes in social media bounty boards for criminals, designer fashion-wearing, military hardware-carrying drug dealers participating in city-wide chases. There’s no police air support in sight – police must be configured as outgunned and undermanned against the octopus of organized crime. There is no logic within it that withstands any scrutiny; it relies on the premises that criminals are simply born evildoers because it erases poverty and deprivation as the circumstances in which antisocial behaviors broadly or lawbreaking discretely gestate and manifest. All these criminals are gilded, including DJ Khaled returning as Manny the Butcher, reprising a bit part from the previous film.[2] Tiffany Haddish plays the owner of a strip club, a former friend or informant of Mike’s, where her girls are also gangsters.

Vanessa Hudgens’s character, Kelly (AMMO weapons expert) is slightly more developed here, perhaps because there was more room with Charles Melton (Rafe in Bad Boys for Life) gone. Alexander Ludwig returns as Dorn, AMMO’s tech expert, and gets a personal pay-off from a set-up in the last film which makes his character richer through relationship. Eric Dane is the shadowy ex-military ex-DEA villain, James MacGrath. It would have been a bolder, more artistically interesting move to leave some ambiguity through to the end of the film about whether he was really with cartels or working for the federal government to control the cartels, but those are the sorts of decisions I imagine the Defense Department’s script readers don’t go for.

Besides the movie relying on the idea that bloated police budgets are very necessary by having them face off against paramilitary and perpetuating longstanding myths about who controls violence in the drug trade (much like The Firm and Cop Land do for graft), there’s a USMC recruitment ad right in the middle of the film. Reggie (Dennis Greene) was introduced to the series twenty-one years ago and I was surprised to see him return for Bad Boys for Life. We learn he’s a marine, he wears his uniform to his wedding; he’s a soft-spoken character that serves more as scenery than a supporting character, little more than an easter egg for longtime fans enjoying the continuity of family. In Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Reggie has a an epic kitchen showdown in some of the best staged close-quarters action in the movie while wearing a green USMC t-shirt, defending the family home from invaders. He has some minimal advanced notice of the home invasion by MacGrath’s henchmen because Mike and Marcus patch-in to the home security system with Dorn’s help. They serve as enraptured audience as he goes on a well-choreographed killing spree. Once the mission is complete, Reggie salutes the camera they are watching on. It’s a crowd-pleasing, cheer-calling moment. It is a Marine Corps recruitment ad in the middle of the supercop movie. I suppose it could be perceived as the cost of removing the third act turn in each of the last two movies where the cops invade foreign waters (Cuba working with anti-Castro militants in Bad Boys II, Mexico with loose clandestine federal backing in Bad Boys for Life).

There is a sentiment I heard sometime in the last several years that proposes that the propagandistic notions within film and television can be so absurd and outlandish as to almost be not worth mentioning. For instance, once cops are taking on the powers of superheroes they cease to function as cops and are so separate from reality that no one can possibly be reading them as the thing they represent. To put it generously, I think this is misguided. It is unlikely that propaganda can ever get so unmoored from reality that it ceases to function effectively to support its ideological goals just because it is outlandish; it needs more than that to fail. Captain America, for instance, literally serves propaganda purposes within the universe of the films he stars in, as part of the character’s origin being diverted to the USO and later used in classroom PSAs. This character origin turned comedic element underscores rather than undermines the imagery of a star-spangled man fighting aliens and being worthy of a magical, extraterrestrial hammer.

Propaganda that is of such high quality or so successful at engaging its audience that apparently critically-minded people overcome their own acknowledgment of its insidious nature to praise it is still very much propaganda. One might say it is especially successful propaganda, overcoming the apprehensions of people that should know better. Bad Boys: Ride or Die is perhaps the first movie I have seen where I tried to internalize that refutation; it is so over the top that I thought, “Oh, certainly people cannot think this is what cops do or are like.” And perhaps that is the case, but when I saw Rush Hour as a child it still made policing look appealing. And at the end of Bad Boys for Life I imagined police watching these movies must get a “rah-rah” sort of kick out of it just as earnest supporters of the military surely will for Reggie’s righteous rampage.

Corollary to the “people who should know better being done in” aspect is that there are people who just tire of hearing about it. There are people well-informed or aware of the propagandistic trends running through mass culture in our society to convince people of the rationality and righteousness of our status quo who have lost the feeling of novelty in seeing it pointed out because they realized that pointing it out alone doesn’t fix society. I empathize with the exasperation. What they may fail to realize, as many people do when engaging with any piece of art, is that their perspective and experience is not universal. Lots of people do not recognize propaganda because that is the nature of propaganda – to pierce it requires challenging its basic premises. This means questioning the social and political purpose of having so many movies and TV shows which position police as superheroes fighting shadowy, well-financed evildoers that seemingly sprout out of the ground as fully-formed vicious monsters. It is worth considering what the consequences of that are on society, and our responsibility to challenge and beware of it.

After its opening weekend, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is already on the road to sweeping financial success. It is also inextricably tied to the tradition of propagating myths about the necessity and utility of police, regardless of who’s in it and who it’s sold to. Irrespective of its success and its unexamined compromised ethics, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a competent buddy cop action comedy with interesting camera work and fun creative decisions, if a bit cliched in its storytelling. It is also full of callbacks, which can begin to feel tired and uncreative. It pays off a lot that is set up in the last film and may well end up being the centerpiece of a trilogy. Where it succeeds is getting the blood pumping, making the eyes open wide and the jaw perhaps drop. It elicits laughter frequently, leaning less on “we’re old” jokes than its predecessor, and invokes suspense. And I’m pleased to say I’m now familiar enough with Lorne Balfe that I recognized his composition and orchestration before I saw him in the titles; I love his technique. This is a well-made and entertaining film. Still, with the resources marshaled to create a movie like this, we ought to consider if these are the type of heroes we want to see forever. Luckily its R rating means it’s likely some deal of the audience understands that this is a fantasy of policing in no way reflective of their actual goals, methods, or circumstances of operation. There are more questions to be asked and a broader discussion to be had about the uses of violence as spectacle, but we’ll save that for another day to soon come.

Final Score: 3.5/5

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[1] Adil & Bilall, as they are known, were also among the creative team for the Disney+ TV series Ms. Marvel and directed the first two episodes of the FX crime drama Snowfall, created an un-aired pilot for a television adaptation of the crime comic Scalped, were attached to direct the fourth Beverly Hills Cop film, and directed the scrapped Batgirl movie, in addition to three successful features about urban life and the Moroccan diaspora in Belgium (2015 romantic crime film Black, 2018 crime film Gangsta, and 2022 drama Rebel).

[2] U.S. reggaeton artist Nicky Jam portrayed a secondary antagonist in the previous film, and both films feature many hip-hop artist cameos.