Ride Along Review

The buddy cop comedy genre isn’t devoid of bad films. Recent efforts like 21 Jump Street, The Other Guys, and Hot Fuzz join the best of the bunch; so a new film in the genre has to standout in some way to be included with the greats. Unfortunately, Ride Along does not do that. With only a couple of chuckles and two weak lead characters, the Ice Cube and Kevin Hart starring Ride Along joins the most forgettable the genre has to offer.

When High School cop Ben Barber gets accepted to the police academy, he finally has something to impress his girlfriend’s brother James, a police detective, with. His goal is to get his blessing so he can marry his sister as their parents aren’t in the picture. To see if he really has what it takes, James takes Ben on a ride along, where a civilian observes a day in the life of a police officer.

With a great premise like that and two great comedic actors playing Ben and James (Kevin Hart and Ice Cube respectively), it’s a shame that it’s the screenplay that drags this movie down. This movie is just not funny. It’s not even that the movie really tried with the jokes, most of the dialogue in the film is just explaining what’s happening in the pretty basic story. There were hardly any attempts at humor in the film. It’s one of those cases where the trailers had all the jokes leaving nothing for the movie.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO_mFVXlkQU[/youtube]

I chuckled maybe once or twice but I just didn’t find anything funny. The movie’s not even made enjoyable with the two poor leads. Kevin Hart and Ice Cube are fine in the film but they are given such weak material here. Kevin Hart comes off as annoying in the film; not even capable of doing the simplest task and making a huge deal out of everything. Ice Cube is just a big jerk watching Kevin Hart get ripped to shreds instead of actually helping the guy and doing his job as a police officer.

You are right when you say that’s the point of the movie, but what the movie failed to do here was actually deliver on the laughs. Each scenario is also drawn out where you get bored and uninterested of what’s happening, and the dialogue wasn’t made entertaining enough where it can get passed that. The entire movie feels long, bloated, and boring, making for a pretty crappy movie experience.

THE VERDICT

Critics ripped The Hangover Part III to shreds and, while I agree the movie wasn’t really funny, it was entertaining so I enjoyed the movie. Ride Along wasn’t funny but wasn’t entertaining making there no point to watch this movie. If you found the trailers funny like I did, it’s because that’s where all the jokes were. Ice Cube and Kevin Hart try, but their characters are so unlikable that I just didn’t care about anything that happened to them. Besides a couple of chuckles, there’s nothing redeemable about Ride Along.