In Review: 'Bad Boys: Ride Or Die,' 'The Watchers'

A venerable buddy-cop franchise delivers the action goods while a second-generation director makes an appropriately twisty debut.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Dir. Adil & Bilall
115 min.

With the heaviest of hearts, it is my solemn critical duty to inform you that the Bad Boys franchise, now in its fourth iteration after kicking off nearly 30 years ago, has a mythology. If you have not seen Bad Boys for Life, the 2020 revival of the series after a 17-year absence, you will be unprepared for Bad Boys: Ride or Die—which is a shame, because it’s the best one of the four and should not take any work on the audience’s part to enjoy. This is especially perverse because the film operates like a supersized version of a sturdy, plug-and-play buddy-cop show, delivering stylish action and fun while basically hitting the reset button at the end. Set in the neon-streaked, club-thumping, bikini-babed world of South Beach, it could be mistaken for a series where Michael Mann directed the first episode and left a blueprint for journeymen to follow.

So as a public service, let me bring you up to speed, lest you feel obligated to dive into its serviceable (and by no means unpleasant) predecessor: In Bad Boys for Life, a Mexican cartel boss named Isabel (Kate del Castillo) sends her cold-blooded son Armando (Jacob Scipio) on a vengeful killing spree in Miami that’s focused on Mike Lowery (Will Smith), the police detective who works alongside longtime partner Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence). As it happens, Mike was once a young cop working deep undercover in the cartel—so undercover that he was sleeping with Isabel, then the kingpin’s wife. It turns out that Armando, the man trying to kill him, is his son. (Also, Isabel is a witch. There will be no further inquiries at this time.) 

Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the second Bad Boys film directed by Adil & Bilall, presumably Michael Bay’s non-union Belgian equivalents, starts with Armando in prison and a scandal swirling around Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano), the beloved police captain he executed in the previous film. Doctored evidence has convinced the FBI and many others to believe that Capt. Howard was in league with a mafia organization and it’s on Mike and Marcus to prove their late mentor’s innocence. This puts them at odds with higher-ups within the department, which has at least one mole. Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, and Paola Núñez return from the last film as members of AMMO, the special unit that assisted them on their last mission. (May December breakout star Charles Melton, the cocky AMMO gunman from Bad Boys 3, has peaced out for unexplained reasons.) 

That’s a lot more information than should be necessary, but Adil & Bilall offer in coherence what they lose in Bay’s gonzo directing style. The tradeoff turns out to be a good one: Ride or Die may look like off-brand Jerry Bruckheimer, but it’s crisply orchestrated and tonally on-point, honing in on the lively old-guy chemistry between Smith and Lawrence. In a small but endlessly inspired running gag, Marcus suffers a near-death experience early in the film and comes back thoroughly convinced that it wasn’t his time to go and he is thus unkillable. And so with the unflappability of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now or Jeff Bridges in Fearless, he dashes through shootouts with a serene grin, a hilarious contrast from his blind panic in the previous films. 

The plotting of Ride or Die is generic in the extreme—if you can’t spot the mole on first glance, what a surprising world this must be for you—and it’s a shame to see Better Call Saul’s brilliant Rhea Seahorn shoehorned into a dimmer version of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. But the banter between the two stars still crackles with energy and Marcus’s weirdly sanguine behavior gives Mike a new reason to be exasperated with him all the time. There’s also a major shootout at an alligator farm. Sometimes movies don’t have to be that complicated. A couple of funny guys, a bunch of explosions, a giant albino alligator: That’s entertainment! — Scott Tobias  

Bad Boys: Ride or Die opens in theaters everywhere tonight.

The Watchers
Dir. Ishana Night Shyamalan
102 min.

Mina (Dakota Fanning), an American living in the Irish coastal city of Galway, does little to try to hide her sadness as she lives an under-the-radar existence as a pet store clerk. Voicemails from her sister suggest she’s running away from her past. Occasional nights on the town spent donning a wig and pretending to be someone else suggest she’s running away from her present. When she’s tasked with driving a rare bird to Belfast by way of the deep, dark Irish woods, that’s fine with her. She really has nothing else going on and, even if she doesn’t like it that way, she’s not interested in finding an alternative, either. She likes to hide. Soon, that won’t be an alternative.

Adapting a novel by Irish horror author A.M. Shine, the feature debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan is built around an irresistible premise. Chased by an unseen threat after her car breaks down in the woods, Mina takes safety in a place she’ll soon learn is called “The Coop,” a small, one-room structure containing a Victrola, a few pieces of furniture, a television set, and little else. But its most striking feature is a large window that, Mina soon discovers, doubles as a one-way mirror. Already home to the older, professorial Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), a young man named Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and Ciara (Georgina Campbell), a woman waiting for her husband to return from an escape attempt, The Coop doubles as a prison and an entertainment center. By day, its residents are free to wander the forest looking for food within the boundaries of spots marked as points of no return. By night, they’re to be observed by unseen creatures that grow impatient when they don’t like what they see, howling in protest and pounding against the increasingly fragile-seeming window that separates the Coop from its seemingly monstrous keepers.

Shyamalan’s film flirts with a few potentially rich themes, particularly whenever it draws parallels between its characters’ situations and Lair of Love, the Big Brother-like reality show whose DVD set seems to be Mina and her companions’ sole viewing option. Fanning’s elusive, understated work keeps Mina compelling, too. Could the flashbacks to a traumatic childhood incident have something to do with the threat outside the Coop? And what, really, is the deal with her love of disguises and false identities? In fact, all four principals deliver strong performances in sync with Shyamalan’s style. The daughter of M. Night Shyamalan, who serves as producer, she’s inherited her father’s gift for working with actors and her disciplined, careful direction is nicely complemented by the work of Lamb cinematographer Eli Arenson.

Unfortunately, The Watchers also suggests she’s inherited the problems that have plagued M. Night’s latter-day efforts, in which an abundance of meticulously crafted portent is ultimately revealed to be in service of a facile story with little to say. In fact, the final stretch of The Watchers plays like an attempt to stretch an unsatisfying twist into a whole, unsatisfying bonus act that, not content with merely explaining the preceding mystery, sets about dissecting it bit by bit before our eyes. It’s a gripping film until it’s not. Moviegoers may wish they, too, have something to pound in frustration. —Keith Phipps

The Watchers creeps into theaters tonight.