Ride Along (2014)

Ride Along arrives as sturdy January counterprogramming: a buddy-cop comedy with two Black stars, a twenty-five million dollar budget, and a willingness to let Kevin Hart shriek at volume for ninety-nine minutes. The picture is Black-led in a way mainstream studios rarely attempted at this scale in 2014, and the production history adds a small wrinkle, since Ben Barber was originally conceived as an upper-crust white psychiatrist before the role was rewritten for Hart. That is a casting decision worth a modest nod. It is also entirely unremarked upon in the finished film, which treats the matter as a scheduling convenience.

The film never engages race as a subject. Atlanta serves as a backdrop of strip clubs and warehouses, and the plot concerns passport forgery and an arms dealer played by Laurence Fishburne with the weary dignity of a man who has done this before. There is no cultural commentary, no institutional critique, no sermon. The villains move weapons, not capital, so any appetite for class warfare goes unfed. Tika Sumpter's Angela exists chiefly as the prize motivating two men, though she does land one clean knockout blow in the third act, which is more agency than the screenplay otherwise extends to her. Ben's video-game fixation is a punchline, never a diagnosis. No romantic configuration beyond the conventional appears, and no environmental lament interrupts the car chases.

What remains is a broad, crowd-pleasing comedy that wants nothing more than to sell tickets, and it sold a great many. It held the top spot at the domestic box office for three weeks, which tells us something about the appetites of the moviegoing public that criticism cannot touch. There is no lecturing here, no body-positive subplot, no historical revision, no lesson of any kind. The film's cultural awareness extends about as far as its running time. We classify it accordingly, with the mild admiration owed to a machine that performs its function and then stops.

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