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Film Review – Ride Along

Director: Tim Story
Screenplay: Jason Mantzoukas
Cast: Ice Cube, Kevin Hart, Tika Sumpter and Laurence Fishburne
Genre: Comedy
Ratings:*

Rating Score
* – Poor
** – Average
*** – Good
**** – Very Good
***** – Excellent

Ride Along is about a fast talking, jumpy security guard Ben Barber (Kevin Hart) who dreams of becoming a police officer. He tries to impress his brother-in-law-to-be James Payton (Ice Cube) who is a real police officer. However, he keeps getting on his bad side because of his clumsiness and his propensity for not thinking before he talks or does something.
Eventually Ben gets accepted to the police academy and to prove he is capable of being a police officer he decides to go on patrol with James to get a feel of things. James sets up Ben to make the patrol horrible for him but eventually the patrol begins to turn into a real case as James finds clues that lead to a closure of a three-year old case he has been working on, against the mysterious criminal Omar (Laurence Fishburne).

Where do I begin with this movie? It is not funny, it feels very familiar like I have watched it before and it is so predictable. The acting is mediocre, I would suggest you rather watch Kevisn Hart do stand-up, because he is much more funny doing a one man show, than what he accomplishes in Ride Along.
And as for Ice Cube I have seen him play this part before in the 2005 comedy Are We There Yet. I have seen him before make that angry supposed to scare you face, and act like the tough guy that wants to do good. He should stick to rapping for now until a better more meaningful part comes along where he can really show us his acting skills like he did in the 1991 drama Boys in the Hood.
I have no words for this movie. I forgot about it as a soon as it ended, that is way I am not surprised that it got negative reviews. Steve Pulaski of Influx Magazine, an arts and entertainment publication, stated that it is a cut and paste, buddy cop movie that seems to have assembled its screenplay from other films of the same genre and mashed them together in this particular project unaltered. [It is] about the usual circumstances of street crime and mobster with a romantic twist in an attempt to offer narrative leverage.”
This statement actually does make sense. Ride Along reminds me of movies like Lethal Weapon (Danny Glover and Mel Gibson), Rush Hour (Jacki Chan and Chris Tucker) and Bad Boys (Will Smith and Martin Lawrence), but the only difference is that the acting in these three movies is brilliant and they were funny.

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