Movie Review: Ride Along 2
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
It made sense that we got the buddy cop film Ride Along (2014) starring Ice Cube and Kevin Hart. A film for them to work off such different personalities; they always seemed like a perfect duo. Coming from director Tim Story, 
who should be most remembered for making one of the few misses in the Marvel Universal with Fantastic Four (2004), Ride Along was such an unoriginal ride that it wasted both Ice Cube and Kevin Hart. Not much has changed in Ride Along 2.
Even with issues in their careers, actors Ice Cube and Kevin Hart are talented. Ice Cube came to fame due to his hip hop group N.W.A in the late 1980s to early 1990s and in his feature film Boyz N the Hood; both things ahead of their time and so accurate on predicting the escalation in police brutality. For someone who started in the music industry, it’s impressive for how well he’s done as an actor for so long. The only issue with his career is that he has played the same rough, tiresome personality for years.
Kevin Hart is in his prime of his career and one of the few actors whose stand-up career has been more impressive then his feature film career. Famous for putting in himself in bad material in films like Think Like a Man Too and the first Ride Along, he, like Ice Cube, plays the same character over and over. He’s always been the silly, clumsy, made fun of character that never gets the renegotiation.
The new film follows Ben Barber (Hart) who, after fighting off a Serbian smuggler in the first installment, has now graduated from the police academy and is officially a cop and getting married to his girlfriend Angela (Tika Sumpter) in a week. His future brother-in-law James Patyon (Cube) still has his doubts about Ben and questions his maturity level. Both eventually get assigned to a case in Miami to capture drug lord and high-end Miami guy Antonio Pope (Benjamin Bratt).
The buddy cop genre has always been a hit or miss genre and we’ve seen Ride Along 2 too many times along with it’s issues. We can like Cube and Hart a lot but the laughs between them are few and far between, they are playing those same characters again and they literally have no character development between them. It’s quite nice to have new characters in this installment like Maya (Olivia Munn) playing a Miami cop or AJ (Ken Jeong) who’s the key to solving the case, but even they have issues. Munn is given nothing to do and Jeong is forced into the film. Let’s also not forgot the wedding aspect of this film, which fails badly to work as a secondary plot and talented Tika Sumpter seems almost forgotten.
Once you get to the villains, it’s more unoriginal product. We should really like the effort to change the atmosphere to Miami but, again, we have seen Miami so many times in cop stories just like this. Bratt’s whole scheme is so muddled and the character itself is given very little detail.
Ride Along 2 is such a cookie-cutter entry to the genre, we gain nothing from it and it’s hard to sit through at times due to how boring it is. If this makes money, expect another middling third installment.
Alexander Wolff
