Ride Along 2

After the success of Ride Along comes along this lukewarm retread with less plot and less funny lines.

Ice Cube and Kevin Hart are still the prospective brothers in law to be but Hart is a probationary police officer. An interesting beginning as Hart ends up being responsible for Cube's partner, Tyrese Gibson getting shot.

After that the plot moves to Miami where the two head off to find a hacker, Ken Jeong who is there to trade comedy with Hart while Cube can get on with the main plot of taking down a crime lord, Benjamin Bratt.

There are a few amusing scenes, the pair trade insults and banter with each other as Hart desperately tries to impress Cube. There is some decent action in the last part of the movie but it just feels like a lazily inspired sequel that brings nothing new to the table.

What do you expect? You know what kind of movie this will be.

It is a bit dumb and full of clichés. The story is paint by numbers and you can predict the ending after the 30 minutes. The characters are as stereotyped as possible (ranging from no non-sense cop to diabolical, good looking evil mastermind and very attractive female side-kick).

It is a bad movie though? No. I've actually enjoyed it. It is the kind of movie to which you go, have a laugh laugh, go home and forget all about it. It won't enter any top movie list and it won't teach you anything useful. But it will make you laugh and that's a good thing.

I guess there were better movies out there for which to pay $10 to see, but I don't regret the time spent. It was like eating a bar of chocolate, good and then you move on with your life.

I am a Kevin Hart fan. Some comedians just have the innate ability to make you laugh, and I feel like he has that indescribable ability. My expectations were for low, like for every comedy sequel and I wanted to like this movie. But...

The audience expectations for a comedy sequel are so low it should be relatively straightforward for the screenwriter and director to satisfy us. The situation is perfectly setup for a studio / audience win win. Give us recycled jokes in a new setting, we laugh through a forgettable movie and studio makes bank. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Ride Along 2 falls prey to the usual sequel pitfalls and doesn't even give Kevin Hart room to maneuver.

The best parallel to a recent movie I can think of is The Hangover Part II. Part I was so funny, everyone was going to give Part II a watch, hoping it would top the first installment. Instead you got the sequel trap - recycled jokes (still can be funny), but the bigger budget distracted the director.

That encapsulates Ride Along 2. Unfortunately, the bigger budget means less time for Kevin Hart to be funny and more action scenes, which no one really cares about. Watching the movie, I felt like I had to impatiently wait during the usual foot chase / car chase / shootout scenes to get rewarded with a Kevin Hart joke.

We did not pay money to watch ice cube shoot at bad guys. We wanted to laugh at Kevin Hart. It is so frustrating because the formula for success is so easy to execute. Show us the beginning or ending of action scenes and give Kevin more time to play off the stone faced ice cube. Ice cube doesn't even need to act to play the straight cop, anyone could do it. But instead we get way too long action scenes, romantic ice cube subplot (which is so unrealistic it actually distracts the viewer and takes away from the movie) and less laughs.

If you are on a plane or want to put on a movie as you fall asleep, Ride Along 2 is the play. Don't waste time and money in the actual theater for this one.

Ben Barber (Kevin Hart) is a rookie cop and getting married to Angela Payton. Police detective James Payton (Ice Cube) is going to Miami to track down computer hacker AJ (Ken Jeong). Angela talks her brother into letting Ben join him. They find help from Miami police detective Maya Cruz (Olivia Munn). AJ is involved with villainous Antonio Pope (Benjamin Bratt).

After the original, I thought the sequel has a chance. I thought the guys' chemistry would make a good buddy cop comedy if they can turn friends. They're still not that friendly but I'm still going to say I'm wrong. Kevin is doing the same thing and it's getting tiresome. Maybe the repetition is getting to me. It's actually getting a little annoying. He may be losing me at this point. It's time he consider something different.

Ice Cube and Kevin Hart return to milk their chemistry from the first Ride Along in the sequel to a movie that was just alright.

This time around Kevin Hart's charter, Ben is a full fledged police officer (in training), who tags along with his future brother-in-law James from Atlanta to Miami to question a suspect.

Though Kevin Hart seems more outrageous in this film as he gets down with some serious slapstick, he is not as funny as he could be. This is a huge problem for Ice Cube's perfect straight man persona who has no real material to bounce off of.

It's even sadder that they have Ken Jeong in the picture and did nothing with it. You'd expect some real good laughs when Jeong and Hart get together in a scene but it did not happen like that.

New characters played by Oliva Munn and Benjamin Bratt were good seasoning on the franchise, but I could still taste the staleness.

It's not a bad movie, it's a decent buddy cop movie with a lot of action, but I was not expecting Lethal Weapon, I was expecting 48 hours and got neither.