Review: 'Bad Boys: Ride or Die' aims to give Will Smith some career rehab, in an incoherent action movie that veers unsteadily from raging action to broad comedy

It’s hard to think of anyone who needs or particularly wants a fourth movie in the “Bad Boys” franchise who didn’t work on it. 

Topping that list is one of the stars, Will Smith, on the first step at rehabilitating the career he literally slapped away on the night he won an Oscar. Also in need of a hit is the directing team of Adil & Bilali, whose last movie was Warner Bros.’ shelved-for-tax-purposes “Batgirl” movie.

But are there fans clamoring for the fourth installment of a franchise that, at 29, is older than the movie’s target audience? Particularly one that’s this tonally unbalanced, careening from unfocused mayhem and scattershot humor? Only the box office knows.

The movie begins with Smith’s Mike Lowrey and his longtime Miami PD partner, Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence), racing in Mike’s Porsche to an important appointment — one interrupted by quick stop at a convenience store, where the two cops interfere with a robbery. Soon we see what they were rushing toward: Mike’s wedding to Christine (Melanie Liburd), who, we’re told, was Mike’s physical therapist after getting shot in the last movie, 2020’s “Bad Boys For Life.”

At the wedding reception, Marcus has a heart attack and has a near-death experience — one featuring Marcus and Mike’s old boss, Capt. Howard (Joe Pantoliano), who was killed off in the last movie. Howard tells Marcus that it’s not his time, and when he revives, Marcus feels both a zen-like calm and a belief that he can’t be killed.

Of course, someone wants Marcus and Mike dead — they always do in these movies — but first they have to be made to suffer. The mystery bad guy, introduced initially only as McGrath (played by Eric Dane), arranges to have $20 million in drug cartel money wired into Capt. Howard’s old bank account. This leads Mike and Marcus’ current boss, Capt. Rita Secada (Paola Nuñez), and the U.S. attorney, Lockwood (Ioan Gruffudd), to suspect Howard was corrupt. Mike and Marcus refuse to accept this, and work to convince everyone, including Howard’s daughter, Judy (Rhea Seehorn), a U.S. marshal, that he was honest.

They get help in this pursuit by Howard himself, through a series of messages he recorded before his death. This provides the cops a trail to follow, if they can do so while McGrath is busy setting Mike and Marcus up to look like dirty cops themselves. Soon, the only people our heroes can trust are two young Miami cops, Kelly (Vanessa Hudgens) and Dorn (Alexander Ludwig), and Mike’s assassin son, Armando (Jacob Scipio), all characters we met in the last movie. Meanwhile, every law officer wants to apprehend them and every street criminal wants the $5 million bounty put on their heads.

The directors, Adil El Arbi and Bilali Fallah, try to have it both ways. They want the thunderous action and explosions of the previous films, as well as the macho, jokey byplay between Smith and Lawrence, lawmen so cool they sing their own theme song — and, yes, that song pops up a lot, including one cover version that’s actually, in context, pretty funny. 

The humor, though, is often at odds with the stakes the script, by Chris Bremner and Will Beall, tries to lay out.  That includes some off-putting brief appearances by Tiffany Haddish and DJ Khaled (the latter reprising his role from the last movie), and the apparently obligatory cameo from Michael Bay, who directed the first two movies back in 1995 and 2003, respectively.

The question for “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” is whether Smith and Lawrence can apply their charms, as leading men or comic foils, to make us care for our heroes as they slide through their 50s. Lawrence had some funny moments, and Smith can still pour on the charisma when It’s asked of him. They’re not enough to save this mess of a movie, though. 

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‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’

★★

Opens Friday, June 7, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Young Woman and the Sea' gives Daisy Ridley a chance to shine, playing a real sports hero of another era

As old-fashioned inspirational sports stories go, “Young Woman and the Sea” goes pretty well — a charming, if undemanding, story of a lone athlete battling the currents, the long odds and a society that has to be shown the value of a female hero.

Daisy Ridley, our current leading Jedi, stars as Trudy Ederle — who made world headlines 98 years ago by becoming (spoiler alert!) the first woman to successfully swim across the English Channel. It was a feat that a Jazz Age world marveled at, and 20 years later was still worthy of discussion. (It earned a mention in the 1944 horse drama “National Velvet.”) 

The movie starts in 1914, with 9-year-old Trudy (played by Olive Abercrombie), the younger daughter of German immigrants Henry (Kim Bodnia), a butcher, and Gertrud (Jeanette Hain), who brought in money with her sewing. Trudy suffers a bout of the measles, getting so sick that the doctor predicts her death, but rallies back to health. 

Shortly thereafter, when Mom insists her older daughter, Meg (played by Lilly Aspell as a young girl), learns to swim, Trudy isn’t allowed into the pool, for fear that she could spread measles to the other kids. Instead, Trudy and Meg — portrayed as young adults by Ridley and Tilda Cobham-Hervey (who played Helen Reddy in the 2019 biopic “I Am Woman”) — challenge each other by swimming around the pier at Coney Island. 

Then Meg is given a chance to compete for a women’s swim team — a rarity in the ‘20s — but the coach, Charlotte Epstein (Sian Clifford, from “Fleabag”), doesn’t think Trudy has the form to become a fast swimmer. As the viewers have already learned, telling Trudy she can’t is a sure-fire way of ensuring that she will. In short order, she’s breaking swimming records and earning a spot on the 1924 U.S Olympic team in Paris.

Meg, however, is not going on the journey. Instead, Meg is following the path her parents have set out for her — the only path available to women then, the movie tells us — by marrying the apprentice butcher her parents have selected for her. 

Preparing for the Olympics, Trudy learns that the head of the American governing body, James Sullivan (Glenn Fleshler) — who only reluctantly is approving a women’s team to compete in Paris — has chosen a male coach, Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston), to lead the women swimmers. But Wolffe is more concerned about preserving the women’s chastity on the voyage over than letting them train, so Trudy’s showing in Paris is less than expected.

After the Olympics, though, Trudy doesn’t want to quit swimming, and announces to her family that she will swim the English Channel. Again her obstacles are Sullivan’s chauvinism and Wolffe’s mule-headed thinking about the right way to swim the Channel — which he has attempted a dozen times. “How many successfully?” Trudy asks cheekily. Meanwhile, Trudy gains the respect of the veteran male swimmers who brave the Channel, including the eccentric William Burgess (Stephe Graham), the second man to successfully make the crossing.

Screenwriter Jeff Nathanson — a Disney pro who wrote the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie and the remake of “The Lion King” — adapts Glenn Stout’s biography of Ederle into the sort of square-jawed, one person against the system biopic that you thought Hollywood didn’t make any more. The stilted dialogue and melodramatic plotting feels like something out of another cinematic era, closer to Trudy’s 1926 than to our 2024.

The Norwegian director Joachim Rønning, has also come up through the Disney machine — he co-directed “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” and directed “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” — and hit the story rhythms reliably if not always subtly. Rønning’s work shines in the actual channel crossing, giving Ridley space to capture the physical and psychological strains of the endeavor. 

There will be an inevitable comparison between Ridley’s performance here and Annette Bening’s Oscar-nominated turn in “Nyad.” In the water, it’s about even. The difference is how each actor takes on the role on dry land — and Ridley is given less to work with playing the sweet-natured Trudy than Bening got with the more prickly Diana Nyad.

It would be easy to dismiss “Young Woman and the Sea” as a Disney-style piece of wholesome family entertainment, with the rough edges smoothed down for all-ages viewing. But in its best moments, focusing on Ridley’s Trudy and her determination and her family bonds, the movie comes out a winner.

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‘Young Woman and the Sea’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 31, in theaters. Rated PG for thematic elements, some language and partial nudity. Running time: 129 minutes.

Review: 'Robot Dreams' is a deceptively simple and wonderfully charming animated tale of friendship between a dog and his robot companion.

As a writer, it’s always a cop-out to say “words fail me” or that something is “indescribable” — that’s our job, after all — but it’s hard not to fall back on such language when reviewing the Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger’s “Robot Dreams,” a movie whose magic lives far beyond its synopsis. 

Berger, adapting American writer-illustrator Sara Varon’s graphic novel, starts with Dog, who lives a lonely life in a New York apartment sometime in the 1980s. One night, after microwaving his TV dinner, he turns on the TV and comes across an ad for the Amica 2000, a robot companion. 

Dog orders one, and soon the mail carrier — a bull, because this New York is populated with anthropomorphic animals — delivers a giant box. Dog opens it up and starts assembling the parts, and that’s how Robot becomes part of Dog’s life. The two spend a wonderful, fun-filled summer together, taking in everything New York has to offer, from Central Park to Coney Island. But as summer starts to turn into fall, one slight miscalculation causes Dog and Robot to be separated, with heartbreaking consequences.

Berger — best known for the surreal Snow White adaptation “Blancanieves” — smartly uses no dialogue, removing any language barrier. (Spanish actor Ivan Labanda is credited with the nonverbal vocal work for both Dog and Robot.) The clever, expressive animation does the emotional lifting, and makes it feel effortless.

Just because there’s no dialogue doesn’t mean the movie’s silent. The sound design captures the vibrant New York street life in all its exuberance. A lot of that city energy comes through music — particularly one needle drop that is just too delightful to spoil by revealing it here.

The deceptively simple animation captures Varon’s line drawings and the sunniest, happiest version of New York City possible, in service to a witty, charming story of friendship crossing boundaries of time and hardship. “Robot Dreams” is the summer jam you didn’t know you needed.

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‘Robot Dreams’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 31, in select theaters. Not rated, but probably PG for mature themes. Running time: 102 minutes. 

Review: 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Story' is a masterpiece of rage, fire and octane, with Anya Taylor-Joy delivering a ferocious performance

In an era where creatures, machines and worlds can be pieced together with pixels, the tactile messiness of George Miller’s “Mad Max” movies — where the stunt driving and other outlandish tricks are, for the most part, happening in camera — is astonishing. 

In Miller’s new rendition, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Miller takes a fascinating detour from the chronicles of Max, the one-time cop now driving across the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic hellscape — to focus on the most interesting character Miller has created: The hardened driver and freedom fighter, Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron in 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Furiosa’s story is told in chapters, the first showing her (played by Alyla Browne) as a young girl riding with her mother (Charlie Fraser), a sharpshooter racing to keep marauders from telling the warlord Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) the location of their “a place of abundance.” Ultimately, Furiosa is kidnapped by Dementus, beginning an odyssey where she has to be smart to see the next sunrise.

For awhile, we watch Furiosa as she’s traded around the wastelands, either with the blowhard Dementus and his scruffy biker minions or in The Citadel, led by the masked Immortal Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his boorish and dim sons, Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and Scrotus (Josh Herman). Dementus controls Gastown, trading fuel for the food Joe’s laborers produce in The Citadel.

It’s nearly an hour before Miller shows us Furiosa as an adult — played by the movie’s star, Anya Taylor-Joy — and by then, she’s a hardened survivor, disguising herself as a young man so she can stay topside and spot opportunities to escape. Such a moment arrives, when Joe’s top driver, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), is assigned to drive a big rig with supplies on the ambush-prone road to Gastown, in what is the movie’s signature stunt sequence. 

The script, by Miller and Nico Lathouris, doesn’t move as swiftly as the one they wrote for “Fury Road,” but that’s a matter of function. This is an origin story, and must be told in fragments — a mosaic rather than an oil painting, where the pieces come together to create the striking portrait of a woman becoming a warrior in front of our eyes.

Taylor-Joy’s performance is breathtaking, bringing out Furiosa’s years of trauma and rage — and all the more impressive because she has sparse dialogue, and much of her emotion is conveyed in economical movement and those expressive eyes. The fact that Taylor-Joy doesn’t let Hemsworth, who’s quite good in the flashier and talkier villain role, steal the movie out from under her is a testament to her fierce talent.

In a George Miller movie, though, the other star is the world he has built — and, once again, the way Miller and his crew construct the movie’s chrome-plated road monsters, made to look cobbled together from spare parts but actually painstaking in every detail, nearly overloads the viewer’s eyes and brain. Between Miller’s world-building and Taylor-Joy’s ferocious performance, “Furiosa” delivers tons of entertainment and still makes the audience want to know what happens next.

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‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 24, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for sequences of strong violence, and grisly images. Running time: 148 minutes.

Review: 'Babes' is a raunchy, down-and-dirty comedy about pregnancy, with a sweet, warmly sentimental center

As a male human, I recognize that the creators of “Babes” — a raunch-filled comedy about pregnancy, impending motherhood and female friendship — were not thinking of me as the target demographic.

But I am happy to report that I laughed a lot, and got emotional a few times, even though some of the jokes and references and heart-tugging beats are beyond my field of experience — because the movie’s stars, Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau, are too funny and too wonderful not to laugh with and fall for.

Glazer’s Eden and Buteau’s Dawn have been best friends since childhood, growing up in New York and becoming as close as sisters. Their lives are not in the same place, though. When the movie begins, Dawn, a dentist, is about to go into labor with her second child with her loving and nerdy husband, Marty (Hasan Minhaj), living on the Upper East Side. Eden is a single woman, a yoga instructor who teaches in her fourth-floor walkup Brooklyn studio, which is also her apartment. 

The two meet for their annual Thanksgiving morning movie date, but Dawn notices that her theater seat is wet. So is the next one. And the next one. Dawn and Eden quickly realize that Dawn is going into labor. So they hurry to a restaurant, so Dawn can get all the good food she won’t be able to have in the hospital, and then go to the hospital to have the baby.

On the train back to Brooklyn, Eden starts a conversation with a guy in a tuxedo, Claude (Stephan James), who’s making the same transfers as she is. As they talk, they discover they have so many other things in common that it’s only natural that they’d end up back at his place and, eventually, in bed together.

You can guess what happens next: After getting ghosted by Claude, Eden takes a pregnancy test — well, 30 actually, since she’s on ‘shrooms at the time — and discovers she’s pregnant. What’s more, she decides she’s going to have the baby, an announcement that Dawn doesn’t greet with all the enthusiasm a supportive best friend is supposed to muster. Dawn knows what’s coming, and isn’t sure Eden is emotionally ready for motherhood.

The script, by Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz (who has a funny cameo as a nervous waiter), digs deep into the gross details of pregnancy and childbirth, finding humor in everything from the length of the amniocentesis needle to the different… er, fluids that come out of a woman at different stages of the gestational process. Women, particularly women who have been through it, will likely laugh and nod in sympathy — at, for example, the scene where Dawn and Eden do to Dawn’s breast pump what the guys in “Office Space” did to a printer. Men, at the very least, will get a long-delayed education.

“Babes” is the directing debut of Pamela Adlon, but that doesn’t mean she’s an untrained rookie. Adlon directed 44 of the 52 episodes of her acclaimed series “Better Things,” in which she played an actress who’s also a single mom of three teen daughters. Here, Adlon displays a very dry wit and a well-tuned sense of the absurdities women endure to be mothers, lovers and friends.

Glazer gets massive amounts of credit for writing herself a wonderful role, and for perfectly embodying Eden’s fumbling journey toward maturity. Bureau is equally delightful, as she conveys the warmth and exasperation of being Eden’s best friend as well as the bone-deep exhaustion of being a supermom. Together, they make “Babes” a buddy-comedy that’s scathingly funny and truly heartfelt.

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‘Babes’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual material, language throughout, and some drug use. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'The Garfield Movie' treats America's favorite fat feline like just another cat

I can’t think of the last time I saw a movie as bland and generic as “The Garfield Movie,” which crunches Jim Davis’ misanthropic comic-strip cat into one more piece of pre-digested intellectual property. 

The first sign of this movie’s lack of imagination is the casting of Chris Pratt as the orange cat with the lasagna fixation. Once upon a time, Pratt brought a naive charm to the voice work on “The Lego Movie.” But as was apparent with “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” Pratt has become a name producers write down to voice the main character until they can think of somebody better — and then forget to think of somebody better.

Unfortunately, the same can be said of Samuel L. Jackson, who provides the voice here to Garfield’s wayward father, Vic. Jackson is a gifted actor with a legendary career, so it’s up to him whether he phones in a voice performance like this.

In the movie’s prologue, the kitten Garfield is abandoned in an alley, but follows his nose to an Italian restaurant — where he finds Jon Arbuckle (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) dining alone. The two bond instantly, over their shared loneliness and Garfield’s discovery of pizza, spaghetti and lasagna. Soon, Garfield makes a home for himself with Jon and his other pet, Odie, who quickly becomes the cat’s 24-hour servant. (Harvey Guillen performs the “voice” of the nonverbal dog.)

Then two thuggish dogs — Roland (voiced by “Ted Lasso’s” Brett Goldstein) and Nolan (voiced by “Saturday Night Live’s” Bowen Yang) — kidnap Garfield and Odie, on the orders of Jinx (voiced by Hannah Waddingham, another “Ted Lasso” alum). Jinx, she reveals in her villain monologue, is after Vic, who used to lead the criminal gang that Jinx ran with, until she got caught and spent years in the pound. Jinx wants Vic, Garfield and Odie, to finish the heist that got her caught: Stealing thousands of gallons of milk from a high-security dairy operation.

When Garfield gets there, he tries to befriend Otto (voiced by Ving Rhames), an aging bull who’s one-half of the dairy’s trademark logo. The other half, Ethel, is locked up tightly within the dairy’s industrial operation — so Otto agrees to help Garfield, Odie and Vic steal a milk truck if they help free Ethel.

It’s abundantly clear early into the story that this movie has wandered far afield of everything we know about the character of Garfield. Very little is said, outside the opening narration, of the cartoon cat’s laziness, or his disdain for his human and his dog — and his infamous hatred of Mondays is raised awkwardly in the dialogue and just as quickly forgotten.

Director Mark Dindal — who hasn’t helmed a movie since “Chicken Little” in 2005 — and a trio of credited writers serve up a few good laughs here and there. But they, and the plot, could have been about any random cat character, not the grumbling, sleep-deprived hater of cute kittens and Mondays that we’ve grown up to love. This is not my Garfield (and finding out that I had a Garfield is disturbing). 

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‘The Garfield Movie’

★★

Opens Friday, May 24, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/peril and mild thematic elements. Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: 'I Saw the TV Glow' digs into childhood fears with an effective story of two teens obsessed with a supernatural television show

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun performs a clever and creepy magic trick in “I Saw the TV Glow”: She makes us completely unsettled by the smallest of details, by zeroing in on the most primal fears of childhood.

When we first meet Owen (Ian Foreman), he’s a lonely seventh-grader in 1996, living with his mom (Danielle Deadwyler, from “Till”) and stepdad (Fred Durst). At his school, he chats with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who’s reading a book that intrigues him, an episode guide for a TV show, “The Pink Opaque.” 

Maddy explains the show’s premise — two teen girls (played in the show-within-a-show by Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) meet at sleepaway camp and discover they’re psychically linked, and in subsequent episodes they’re battling supernatural terrors from opposite sides of town — and Owen wants to watch, even though his parents don’t allow him to stay up that late on a Saturday. (It’s on at 10:30 p.m., just before the cable channel switches over to sitcom reruns.) So one night, Owen sneaks over to Maddy’s and watches his first episode. From then on, he’s hooked.

When Owen — played as an older teen by Justice Smith — can’t get over to Maddy’s, Maddy starts making him VHS tapes of the episodes. That stops when the show is abruptly canceled, and the same night, Maddy disappears mysteriously, leaving behind the burning embers of her TV set in the backyard.

Schoenbrun (who previously made the disturbing “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”) taps into the tropes of late-‘90s teen-driven TV — there’s a hint of Nickelodeon’s “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” and at least one sly nod to “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” — and the ominous ways they burrow into a young fan’s brains. They feel real, maybe more true-to-life in our memory than they really were, and call out to something in these viewers, Owen and Maddy, that’s missing in their solitary lives.

Smith (“The American Society of Magical Negroes”) is effectively unhinged as the older Owen, as he’s sucked into the world of the Pink Opaque and not sure where it ends and his world begins. Schoenbrun’s more impressive find, though, is Lundy-Paine, whose internalized fear augments and deepens the existential dread running through the movie.

One more thing about “I Saw the TV Glow” that adds to its doom-filled atmosphere is the soundtrack. The indie rocker Alex G creates several of the songs that play in the score — and there’s one scene in a club where we hear compelling stage performances by the bands Sloppy Jane (featuring Phoebe Bridgers) and King Woman. If teenage nightmares have a playlist, these songs are in heavy rotation.

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‘I Saw the TV Glow’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 17, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content, some sexual material, thematic elements and teen smoking. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Evil Does Not Exist' takes us into the woods, and into a dispute between locals and a corporation that's darker than you expect

I don’t know if evil exists or doesn’t, and I don’t know why writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi put the title “Evil Does Not Exist” on his new movie — but I’m glad that he and the movie exist, to let viewers like me chew over such questions.

The movie is set in a rural village in the mountains, which is a short drive from Tokyo but feels quite alien from those city sensibilities. Hamaguchi first introduces us to Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), who’s maybe 8 years old. A typical day has Takumi chopping firewood and performing odd jobs around the village, then picking Hana up from daycare, and the two of them exploring the woods near their house. Takumi knows everything about every tree and is imparting that wisdom to Hana.

One day, Takumi is among the locals attending a town meeting, where two corporate representatives are presenting details about a plan to build a “glamping” campsite in the woods near the village. The reps — Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) — think they can impress the locals with talk of the economic benefit of rich Tokyo tourists coming to their area. But the residents, Takumi included, are unhappy about the details, like whether the tourists will make noise late at night and start wildfires, or whether the septic tank will spill pollution into the groundwater and taint the drinking water downstream. (Among his many odd jobs, Takumi collects stream water for his friends who run an udon restaurant, so the pollution issue is also about his livelihood.)

Ultimately, the residents catch on that the reps have no authority, and were actually hired by a talent agency to act out the roles of competent glad-handers. When Takahashi and Mayuzumi report back to the slick CEO and his condescending consultant, the CEO has an idea: Try to hire Takumi as caretaker for the clamping site. So the reps head back to the village to try to convince Takumi.

I won’t say much more about what happens next — except to say that the ending is confounding and will have me thinking about things for a long time. The ending also doesn’t fit the mold of your typical story of city slickers discovering the hidden wisdom of the folks living in the sticks. Actually, it doesn’t fit any mold at all.

Hamaguchi wowed the world with “Drive My Car,” a three-hour drama about grief and theater that won the Oscar for international feature film in 2022. Though “Evil Does Not Exist” is radically different from that one, but one can feel how in both films Hamaguchi is resetting the audience’s expectations and even the way we’re supposed to experience the passage of time. The opening shot of this movie is an unbroken four-minute pan, looking up through the trees at a gray sky. Hamaguchi is telling us to be patient, to let the movie work on its own schedule and rhythms — and when it does, the results are genuinely moving and fascinating.

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‘Evil Does Not Exist’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some violence and language. Running time: 106 minutes; in Japanese with subtitles.