Ride Along 2

The Oscar season is upon us and with it, lots of other award ceremonies as well. Just this week, Spotlight – a truly great movie about journalism, resilience, morality and, to a slight extent, religion – was awarded the top prize at the Critics’ Choice Awards. More shows to come are the (Directors, Writers, Producers, Screen Actors etc.) Guild, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts and the Film Independent Spirit awards. These shows help the films they award generate a lot of money by creating buzz and interest in audiences even more so than blogs, word-of-mouth or critical reviews. Amidst all this, we would expect the only cinema that shows foreign films in Ethiopia to screen a couple of Award hopefuls, a couple of aesthetically endearing movies to live for and love, but no such chance. In fact, we get something that is a complete opposite of the film season: a movie furthest from any sign of imagination, with actors who have been begging for a Golden Raspberry (award for the worst film of the year).
The film is Ride Along 2, and I guess, since it stars Kevin Hart, it was supposed to be a comedy. People who cannot tell the difference between “comedy” and “funny” might have a hard time understanding this last statement. Comedy means sophistication as well as funny. It means Monty Python, the Marx Brothers, Judd Apatow or Ricky Gervais. On the other hand, funny could mean any number of emotionally stunted, run-of-the-mill occurrences. It could mean someone slipping on a piece of banana, a toddler cursing, a donkey passing gas, or a movie like Ride Along 2. Even though these things can be funny, they are definitely not cinema-worthy, not even remotely, and making people pay for them, in my humble opinion, should be criminalized.
The sequel to the 2014 film of the same name sees its two characters, Ben and James, played respectively by Hart and Ice Cube, following a lead in the sunny city of Miami. What could possibly go wrong? A lot – since Ben is an idiot, and James is nowhere as mighty as he thinks he is. The villain is a high profile drug lord which the two struggle to bring down with the help of the city’s police department. As the plot thickens, they fall into all kinds of problems; most of them of their own making, and just for the film’s sake.
So, who is responsible for this terrible, terrible piece of filmmaking? His name is Tim Story, a film graduate, and then briefly a musician, now in his middle 40’s, who co-owns a production company but has no sense of artistic inclination whatsoever. Nonetheless he has been allowed to direct a number of popular films like Taxi, the original Fantastic Four (and its sequel), Think Like a Man (and its sequel) and the first Ride Along movie. To most filmmakers, a film like Ride Along 2 would be the nadir of their career, but not Story, to him, taking into consideration all the other films he has done, this is quite an achievement, one of his best in fact, a highpoint.
Part of the blame for any bad movie should rest on its script writer. It is said that a great script could never be made into a bad movie, even if its director tried hard. On the other hand, a bad, uninspired, immature script could never be made into a good movie, except maybe by Paul Thomas Anderson. And comedy needs great material to work with – more than most genres – because it cannot rely on action sequences or special effects but needs a fresh narrative and nifty dialogue.
I did not crack a smile the entire time Ride Along 2 played; in fact I have not smiled since, that is, until I learned it took two people to write it. And no, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi are not 13, or in any way mentally challenged; they are grown ups with a healthy minds who deliberately, under no coercion, chose to inflict painful garbage upon the film- watching world. I am sure though, if they had tried, they could have done better. This film is made so obviously to pander to the lowest denominator – to appeal to a demographic that listens to the pop boy band One Direction, reads a book per decade, does not know the sun is a star and does whatever social media tells them to do – it reeks of incompetence, but more so, of a desire to be incompetent.
It was the immortal film critic Roger Ebert who once said, “The purpose of a movie critic is to encourage good films and discourage bad ones.” Ride Along 2 is a very bad movie whose intention is not to tell a story but to bank on the fame of a moderately funny comedian and bore and insult its audience. There has recently been a boycott on the Oscars by director Spike Lee and actress Jade Pinket-Smith for the Academy’s non-inclusion of black actors in the nominee lists. This is admirable, and inspiring, we should boycott anything that is unjust or immoral. And that includes 90pc of all the movies that come out of Hollywood each year. They are just as bad as Ride Along 2, they do not seek to do what all art should aspire to – help humanity achieve a higher state of consciousness. Moreover, they desecrate the meaning of cinema, which is beautiful, rich, profound and majestic – all the things Ride Along 2 is not, could never be, and never wanted to be in the first place.