Ride Along

“I’ll never have dinner with the President! I’ll never have dinner with the President! And if I see your ass again, I’ll be hesitant.” Um…I’m not sure what’s up with rappers and rhyming about both male and female asses but I’m fairly certain that Ice Cube never envisioned a Black president in the White House when he wrote those lyrics. I’m also certain that he never saw himself cutting his jeri curl and starring in pg movies with screaming kids. But good for him, it’s better than him being 50 years old and still making songs about Fuck the Police. Actually that would be kind of fresh, it would be like the black sequel to Falling Down; Ice Cube could walk around and yell at white people for being in the local chicken shacks while also shooting at the people that voted for Mitt Romney. But no, he choose the safe route and has a squeaky clean agent that books him buddy cop movies and commercials where he talks trash to an ice cold beer can.

Well his latest safe move has him sinking just a little bit deeper into the quicksand that has become his career as we are forced to sit through 90 minutes of him pretending to be a tough cop in Ride Along. For the most part the odd couple cop movie has become a dead genre but every now and then you get lucky with movies like Rush Hour or any comedy that features Arnold. What the studios rely on to carry these movies is a funny comedian who is at the top of his game. And this worked in All About the Benjamins simply because every scene basically had Mike Epps doing his stand up in it and you were able to laugh your way past any major plot holes that popped up. So being smart, the writers of Ride Along tried the same formula here with Kevin Hart and for the most part it worked. The only problem is that you saw the majority of the really funny scenes in the previews and this consequently forces you to focus on what is supposed to be a plot of this failure.

They give a weak attempt at one as you see Kevin Hart trying desperately to gain the respect and trust of his fiance’s brother Ice Cube. He has a desire to become a cop himself but since he’s 5’2” and a scrub, Ice Cube just doesn’t see it. But naturally, showing that he’s tough enough to survive a full day in the passenger seat of a cop car will change his mind. Basically every scene is just a random setting they have in place to have Kevin Hart say or do something funny and they somehow try and mix in a crime lord subplot in the middle of it. It’s flimsy at best but since it’s a comedy who cares; all you have to do is fill it with cool action scenes and the occasional boob shot.

Well sadly, there is none of that in this movie. The one real action scene takes place at the beginning but Ice Cube basically ruins it by reciting old school hip hop lines while he's chasing down the bad guys in his SUV; trust me, I know it sounds fresh in theory but in actual practice it just comes off lame. It might have worked if he did the West Side Connection yell after every explosion but once again they didn’t confer with me. There is one cute girl in the movie but all you get is her in a tight t shirt every now and then. But before I go off on a boob tangent, I want to make sure that the main point doesn’t get glossed over; whats really wrong with this movie is the advertising. Don’t show us every funny scene that exists in the movie with your multiple trailers. Sure it will get you a great opening weekend (which is all that really matters in Hollywood these days) but once word of mouth takes over, you're done for long term. You have to look towards the future and the possibility of sequels.

Oh well, I rate this movie as WEAK and suggest you wait for Redbox; hopefully by then you will have forgotten all of the trailers.