Enough time used to pass between installments of the Bad Boys franchise that one didn’t have to recall much from the previous film to enjoy the new one. All that mattered was that Will Smith and Martin Lawrence played a couple of temperamentally mismatched but eternally loyal Miami cop buddies. That ends with Bad Boys: Ride or Die , the fourth of these movies, which assumes a surprising amount of familiarity with the previous entry, 2020’s Bad Boys for Life , which revealed that not only did Smith’s Mike Lowry have an illegitimate son with a dark magic-wielding Mexican mob widow, but that the kid, named Armando Aretas (Jacob Scipio), was a ruthless, expert cartel assassin.
These films, whose thunder was arguably stolen by the Fast and the Furious franchise (which churned out seven fast-cars-and-family entries during the 17-year gap between the second and third Bad Boys flicks), have now fully embraced their more soap-opera-like qualities. So Bad Boys: Ride or Die starts with Mike and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) speeding toward Mike’s wedding to Christine (Melanie Liburd). At the ceremony, they pay tribute to their deceased, beloved police captain, Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano), who was killed by Armando in the last movie.
But when the late captain starts getting framed for a series of drug payoffs, Mike and Marcus ride in to redeem their former boss’s good name. Of course, Armando turns out to be the key to the whole thing. And of course, Howard’s bereaved daughter.