Movie review: Run away from ‘Ride Along'
"Ride Along" does to buddy cop comedies what Mount Vesuvius did to Pompeii. Just don't let anyone excavate this disaster of a film.
Whether you like "Ride Along" should depend on how much you like the motor-mouth comedic stylings of Kevin Hart. But just because someone says a lot of words, says them fast and says them loud doesn't necessarily make them funny, and in "Ride Along," very little Hart says is funny. He's basically a poor man's Eddie Murphy. At least he's an improvement over Chris Tucker and Martin Lawrence, but that's like saying scurvy is an improvement over malaria and cholera.
For a buddy cop comedy to succeed, chemistry must exist between the two leads. You'll find little of that between Hart and Ice Cube, basically because both their characters are one-note stereotypes. Ice Cube snarls throughout the entire movie as the tough-guy cop while Hart freaks out throughout the entire movie as the wannabe cop. Here, opposites distract.
For nearly all of the film, "Ride Along" also lacks a villain for this drab duo to confront. Instead, all we hear about is the dangerous Omar, but we never see him until the final scene, nor do we see what makes him so dangerous.
The film instead spends most of its time with James Payton (Ice Cube), an Atlanta Police Department detective, trying to dissuade Ben Barber (Hart), a high school security guard, from becoming a cop. You see Ben is also seeking James' blessing to marry his beautiful sister Angela (Tika Sumpter). If he becomes a cop, Ben believes he will earn James' respect and thus get his blessing. James, of course, doesn't like Ben - he set James on fire at a barbecue, a potentially funny scene that we never see. That would require Ice Cube do to something other than snarl. James also doesn't want Ben to marry his sister.
The comic hook here is that Ben is a video-game junkie who thinks he can apply his gaming skills to real-life police work. Now you may wonder why anyone who has a drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend would spend all his free time playing video games. You might call that person a moron. You also may wonder what a drop-dead gorgeous woman would be doing with a guy who spends all his free time playing video games. You might call that person fictional.
Anyway, James takes Ben on a ride along where he subjects him to a series of nuisance calls. Ben gets to confront a group of loitering bikers, interrogate a bratty child who accuses him of being a pedophile (nothing tickles the funny bone like pedophilia humor) and tries to handcuff a drunk at a market. These scenes might have been funny, but the screenplay by committee - Greg Coolidge, Jason Mantzoukas, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi - contains all the comic zing of a sloth on Quaaludes. To see how these fish-out-of-water confrontations should be handled for maximum comic effect, check out the scene in "48 Hours" where Murphy deals with a bunch of rednecks in a seedy bar.
Director Tim Story goes through the motions by including all the elements of an action-comedy without injecting a shred of imagination. Case in point, the opening scene includes your standard gunfight, standard car chase and standard explosion. That's about all the action the film has to offer until the final scene where we get a longer gunfight and more explosions. The originality astounds.
For imbecilic humor, Ben gets shot in the leg but doesn't even know it. This way he can be taken to the hospital, get shot up with morphine and act all drugged out. Ho-ho-ho. Yet this doesn't prevent him from foiling the bad guys in a few minutes. Maybe he was on baby morphine.
About the only scene that works in this film takes place early on when Ben tells a high-schooler what will happen to him if he chooses to go with the wrong crowd. It's funny and it's also good advice.
As the film concludes, the filmmakers try to soften up James' bad-butt persona by having him tell his tough-luck backstory to Ben. Of course, Ben already knows this so what's the point? Well, you see the audience doesn't know. It's just a last-gasp attempt to build up some sympathy without worrying if it's convoluted or not.
"Ride Along" also wastes the talents of John Leguizamo and Laurence Fishburne. Sumpter, meanwhile, gets to look lovely and prove how easy it is to get out of plastic handcuffs.
The film does contain a few amusing bits here and there, and given better material, Hart can be funny. Unlike Lawrence, he has talent.
Tragically, there's already been talk about a sequel to this movie. Rather than call it "Ride Along 2," the filmmakers should strive for accuracy and call it what it more than likely will be: "Lethal Boredom."
RIDE ALONG (R) Cast includes Ice Cube and Kevin Hart. Directed by Tim Story, written by Greg Coolidge, Jason Mantzoukas, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi. Grade: C-.