Back on Patrol: RIDE ALONG 2

After a woefully underprepared security guard played by Kevin Hart helped his future brother-in-law cop (Ice Cube) take down a big bad guy during a routine job shadow in 2014’s surprise hit comedy Ride Along, he decided to become a police officer, too. Now it’s Ride Along 2, and the talkative, blustering little guy is a rookie cop who really wants his fiancé (Tika Sumpter) to convince her brother to let her needy man go to Miami on a case. She does. So the mismatched pair is together again, this time in a more professional capacity, hot on the trail of a hacker (Ken Jeong) and the drug dealer (Benjamin Bratt) for whom he works. Once again, bland cop mechanics and tepid buddy comedy banter is brought ever so slightly to life through the one-note disjunction between Hart and Cube’s personas. They each get to work a couple of character traits in opposition to the others’ while the plot strands them in a generic detective story that develops lazily.

Deeply uninspired and undercooked, this mediocre and unnecessary movie never makes a good case for itself. The arc of the main relationship – from loud disagreements to begrudging respect – is an exact duplicate of its predecessors, and the journey there is the same dull jumble of thinly developed action beats and repetitive rambling jokey patter. (They’re brothers-in-law, because of the impending wedding, and also they’re in law enforcement. That’s about the funniest it gets.) If the characters were more interesting or entertaining, I suppose I’d be more apt to excuse a passionless, mindless retread. But the screenplay (again by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi) leans hard on the preexisting ideas of who Hart and Cube are, since the first movie didn’t exactly make them much else worth remembering. I still wish they had switched roles way back at the start of this series, making Cube the hyperverbal overconfident guy, and Hart the strong silent type. At least it’d be something different.

But, alas, here we are, with a workmanlike and flavorless film following Hart and Cube through the streets of Miami on an easily solved, but belabored, case. They’re no Bad Boys. We get a generic foot chase (the kind that thinks it’s funny to make the participants bounce off a trampoline and run through people’s houses – stuff like that). Then later a car chase tries to get laughs by intercutting Grand Theft Auto-style video game animation. Other would-be comic action beats include a run-in with an alligator, a car bomb, and shootouts in a nightclub and at the docks. It means well. The location work is functional – sunny and clear – while the action is plain and the comedy and mystery plot are mostly predictable. Returning director Tim Story has a movie that just refuses to think through anything that’s happening, resulting in a halfhearted jumble of cliché. Will the chief (Bruce McGill) threaten to suspend the leads? Will the villain have an inside man? Will women be treated as accessories? All of the above. Duh.

Admirably diverse, so at least it has that going for it, the movie is otherwise routine and uninspired. It’ll contrive a scene for a policewoman played by Olivia Munn to show up to an active crime scene while wearing a sports bra, then not even bother explaining the skimpy reasons why. It’ll include an underdeveloped subplot about a tyrannical wedding planner (Sherri Shepherd). Whatever it takes to shove in an extra stereotype-driven attempt at holding an audience’s attention. There’s so little here. And then there’s the characters’ cavalier approach to guns – shooting at perps, threatening suspects, using the weapons to playact toughness or cover insecurities, treating their job as an extension of a video game. A better comedy could lampoon this mindset (a timely satiric idea) instead of sitting back and snoozing its way through stale cop movie habits. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely not in the mood for a movie with a comedy sequence involving a jumpy policeman shooting an unarmed person (he doesn’t die, but still…), especially in a totally frivolous and disposable mediocrity like this one.

After Hours: RUN ALL NIGHT

Like all the best Liam Neeson action/thrillers of late, Run All Night taps into a deep well of depression and sadness. It’s brisk and exciting, but suffused with reluctance, concerned with matters of broken homes and beaten psyches. Neeson brings a certain amount of dignity to these man-of-action roles, a great actor refusing to coast in material others might view as merely paychecks. He can see the tragedy here. It’s a big part of what makes The Grey, Non-Stop, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and the best bits of Taken such crackling entertainments. They’re elevated by solid direction smartly focused on Neeson’s weary gravitas, a man fighting through existential sorrow to do what he feels must be done.

In Run All Night, he plays an alcoholic ex-hit man trying to wrestle with the demons of his past. He’s estranged from his grown son (Joel Kinnaman), who knows the truth about him and has run towards respectability, working two jobs to make ends meet for his young family. When complications arise and the shooting starts, we find ourselves in an exciting actioner about bad dads and shattered sons trying their best to heal understandably troubled relationships. It’s gruff tough-guy poetry, family melodrama through car chases and shootouts, a gripping violent thriller lamenting the difficulties in breaking cycles of violence.

Neeson’s boss (Ed Harris) has a son (Boyd Holbrook) the same age as his. This young man is the opposite of Kinnaman, trying to be even half the gangster his father was. This leads him to killing a rival drug dealer, a crime Kinnaman happens to witness. Talk about your bad coincidences. So Neeson must scramble to save his son as the full weight of his old criminal friends’ organization swings down to silence the witness. This time, it’s personal. Neeson and Kinnaman race around a New York City night, illuminated by scattered thunderstorms to enhance the drama, trying to stay alive. Around seemingly every corner they find crooked cops, trained killers, and old friends who are suddenly, reluctantly, new enemies (an ensemble full of small roles for Bruce McGill, Vincent D’Onofrio, Common, Genesis Rodriguez, and Nick Nolte).

What’s so satisfying about this set-up is the way screenwriter Brad Ingelsby and director Jaume Collet-Serra make the pulp melodrama as crackling as the action. Terrifically tense scenes of suspense and violence turn into moments of interpersonal conflicts, atonement, and reconciliation as great actors sit and work out characters’ problems. Collet-Serra, who has been grinding out clever and blindsiding impactful genre fare for a while now, quietly becoming one of our most reliable B-movie auteurs with the likes of Orphan and Neeson’s aforementioned Non-Stop, makes space in a film of hard-charging grit for quiet emotional beats. These moments in which characters engage in off-the-cuff soul bearing one-on-one exchanges play just as effectively as the hand-to-hand combat, vehicular mayhem, and discharging firearms.

Collet-Serra’s camera swoops through New York streets, connecting scenes with a CGI Google Street View aesthetic, but Anton Corbijn collaborator Martin Ruhe’s cinematography settles into dancing grain crisply cut together by editor Dirk Westervelt. The filmmakers know how to make a weighty action contraption look great and really move. It starts slow, but once it takes off it builds an irresistible momentum grounded in slick crime drama stoicism, the kind that has as much fun conjuring the dread of violence as the act itself. Whether we're running through an evacuating apartment building tracking multiple deadly cat-and-mouse games, or sitting behind a curtain hoping a bad guy won't think to look there, the film builds its tension out of what might happen, even as it gets satisfaction setting off the fireworks when happenings do erupt.

There’s a moral gravity here, of a deadly sort, that emphasizes the terror as well as the thrill. The filmmakers are wise to key into Neeson’s form, the weariness and grief conjured up by a slump of his shoulders, or in a soft gravely sigh. He’s playing a man clearly skilled in the art of effective violence, and yet can now only summon up the power to put those skills to use to protect those he loves. It’s a dependable formula, and in the hands of such skilled practitioners of the craft, it’s a fine example of its type.

Cop Out: RIDE ALONG

Ride Along is a fish-out-of-water buddy cop comedy with the theoretically funny twist of one of the bickering cops not being a cop. It’s not exactly a new twist on the formula. We’ve seen that dynamic before, played for laughs in films of all kinds, including Die Hard with a Vengeance. In Ride Along, a wimpy security guard (Kevin Hart) agrees to go on patrol with a tough, no-nonsense, breaking-all-the-rules-because-he-knows-best cop (Ice Cube) because he’s dating the man’s sister (Tika Sumpter) and wants to be seen as worthy. The script, which has been cobbled together by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (they of R.I.P.D.) with Greg Coolidge and Jason Mantzoukas, runs through the typical buddy comedy clichés, starting with a scene like something from 2010’s The Other Guys and coasting into an investigation that’s reminiscent of last summer’s The Heat. Every step of the way, the movie coasts on the energy of putting two actors playing opposites bouncing off of each other, getting under each other’s skin, and eventually learning to like each other and work well as a team because, come on, it’s what this kind of movie is.

Cube scowls and Hart shrieks as they work their way through a series of comic sequences. It’s everything their screen presences would have you expect. Think for a second about what the movie might’ve been if they switched parts, with the bulky, glowering Cube as the shivering civilian and the diminutive Hart the blustering seen-it-all confident cop. I’m not saying it’d be a better movie – it’d almost certainly be dismissed as miscast – but at least it’d throw a curveball into its stiffly forced wackiness. It limps around on generic plotting while the actors are only as funny as the off-the-shelf parts of the screenplay allow them to be. Hart stammers and hyperventilates and flings himself into physical bits while Cube growls and gets down to business as he tries to get actual work done. As they encounter typical police work – illegally parked vehicles, drunk and disorderly conduct – Cube keeps Hart distracted and humiliated at every turn.

This thin material certainly isn’t helped by how unhelpful Tim Story’s direction is. It’s just not funny – flat, inexpressive and doing absolutely nothing to help punch up the performer’s timing or augment tepidly humorous scenarios with little bits of visual teasing. For a guy who has spent his career shooting comedies (Barbershop and Think Like a Man), action comedies (Taxi), and light action (two almost-instantly forgotten Fantastic Four movies), he has very little action or comedy in his sense of framing. His is a visual sense that’s clean, professional, and wholly impersonal. It’s sturdy I suppose, but when put to use on a script so thuddingly obvious and jokes that are more miss than hit, it’s not enough. A joke in which Hart mistakenly identifies a woman biker as a man could be a funny joke on him, but the way it’s cut together makes it seem all too ugly a joke on her.

Speaking of ugly, Ride Along seems to find gun violence a whole lot funnier than I do. It’s so light and middling a comedy that skirting around its bleaker comedic impulses makes it seem a little on the icky side. Take these two punchlines. One comes after Hart has, in the process of threatening a suspect with a gun, shot a man in the shoulder. He says, “I thought the safety was on!” I’m sorry if an innocent man accidentally shot (even in what is clearly meant to be played off as nonlethal) doesn’t start me laughing. Then there’s a scene in a gun range when Hart shoots a high-powered shotgun and the kick launches him violently backwards into a wall. “Those should be banned!” he wails, the joke seemingly that he’s not tough enough to handle it, what with his knowledge of firearms limited to violent video games. It seems to me the real joke is that, what with our nation’s dysfunctional relationship to firepower, use of such weapons probably should be constrained, and yet that’ll never happen.

For the most part, though, Ride Along is on cruise control, too light and forgettably formulaic to get riled up over one way or the other. It’s not just the tough cop, outmatched wannabe cop, and the sweet, patient, sure to be third-act-threatened girlfriend. There are standard cop movie characters everywhere, like a gruff lieutenant (Bruce McGill), who doesn’t have the turn-over-your-gun-and-badge scene, but might as well have, and two wisecracking partners (John Leguizamo and Bryan Callen) who push along the investigation while Cube’s preoccupied with his prospective brother-in-law’s failings. There’s not a single unpredictable moment in its entirety, up to and including a terrific cameo appearance in the final stretch that’s been spoiled 80 minutes earlier by listing the actor in question in the opening credits. I suppose it would’ve been too much to ask for this autopilot work of formula picture to have even one welcome surprise.