Ride Along 2 (2016)

Ride Along 2 arrives as the second installment of a franchise that understands its own limitations with a candor that borders on admirable. Kevin Hart shrieks, Ice Cube glowers, and the pair relocates to Miami to chase a drug supplier, a premise the screenplay treats as ample excuse for ninety minutes of vehicular mayhem. The critics were unkind. The audience showed up regardless, and the film opened at number one on its way to a respectable haul. There is no lesson here. There is no sermon. There is a man falling off a jet ski.

The cast is predominantly Black, with Ken Jeong, Benjamin Bratt, and Nadine Velazquez rounding out the supporting ranks, and none of it is offered as a statement. The buddy-cop template has always been a comfortable home for a mixed ensemble, and this film treats its demographics as furniture, not argument. Olivia Munn's Detective Maya Cruz handles herself capably in the field and fires the shot that ends the villain, a modest gesture toward competence that stops well short of any thesis about women in law enforcement. The antagonist, an entrepreneur whose shipping business conceals a criminal enterprise, supplies the film's only faint economic grumble, and it is the oldest grumble in the genre: the rich man is a crook. Miami is not asked to answer for him.

The remaining categories sit undisturbed. Nobody in this film worries about the climate, the body, the mind, or the historical record. The picture preaches nothing, which in an age of feature-length moral instruction registers as either a relief or a vacuum, depending on the hour. It is a sequel, it was reviewed poorly, it made its money, and it was gone from memory by February. We file it accordingly, without complaint and without ceremony.