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
[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.
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