Ride Along

Ride Along marks filmmaker Tim Story’s return to the buddy-cop landscape of his first major misfire, 2004’s Taxi, and it’s clear that the movie ultimately fares just as badly as that Jimmy Fallon/Queen Latifah comedy for many of the same reasons – with both films containing an egregiously over-the-top sensibility that’s reflected most keenly in the grating and relentlessly broad efforts of its respective comedic leading men (Fallon in Taxi and Kevin Hart here). It’s obvious immediately that Ride Along has been geared towards the lowest common denominator, as the familiar storyline, which details the off-the-wall escapades of gruff cop James Payton (Ice Cube) and wacky security guard Ben Barber (Hart), is little more than a clothesline from which Hart’s painfully broad antics are dangled – with Hart’s complete and utter inability to provoke a single laugh from the viewer ensuring that large swaths of the proceedings are nothing less than intolerable. Aside from Hart’s relentless mugging, Ride Along has been saddled with a hopelessly generic (and completely forgettable) narrative that’s overflowing with misguided elements – including a third act set within an abandoned warehouse that seems to go on forever. (Even a late-in-the-game appearance by Laurence Fishburne, cast as a sinister villain, can’t liven up the movie’s dead-on-arrival climax.) The paucity of buddy comedies within contemporary multiplexes makes Ride Along‘s massive failure especially disappointing, with the movie ultimately unlikely to appeal to anyone but the most die-hard fan of Hart’s aggressively larger-than-life shtick.

* out of ****