Ride Along

I will admit upfront that as an actor, Kevin Hart is a taste I have yet to acquire.  So, that probably hindered my enjoyment while watching Ride Along, which is his first leading role in a major Hollywood production.  If you're a fan, you might get more out of this than I did.  Or maybe not.  Outside of its lead star, nothing much stands out about this largely generic enterprise that seems to have been hammered out of the bits and pieces of other cop buddy comedies.

Hart plays Ben Barber, a goofy security guard at an Atlanta high school who has two dreams in his life.  The first is to be accepted into the police academy, and the other is to marry his long-time girlfriend, Angela (Tika Sumpter).  His first dream is on the verge of coming true, when he finally gets a letter informing him he's been accepted.  Now he wants to work on that second dream, which is harder, due to the fact that Angela has an overly protective and tough as nails older brother named James (Ice Cube), who has never liked Ben, and is determined to see that his sister does not marry him.  James is a hard-nosed cop who frequently breaks the rules, and has been spending the past few years chasing after a mysterious criminal mastermind named Omar who is so good at distancing himself from his crimes, no one has ever seen his face.  Now that Ben is on the verge of becoming a cop himself, he arranges to go on a ride along for one day with James, in the hopes that he can prove himself worthy of marrying Angela.

Just by reading that short synopsis, you probably already have a good idea how the rest of Ride Along plays out.  Ben and James start out their day by handling a few small time crimes, where Ben will try to take control of the situation in order to impress James, only to have things go wrong in various comical ways.  James will be on the verge of giving up on the guy, only to form a begrudging amount of respect for him when Ben happens to figure out a clue that might lead him to Omar's location.  James, being the lone wolf that he is, will try to get rid of Ben so that he can take on Omar alone, only to find out that he's in over his head.  Ben will show up and save him.  Then Omar will make one last ditch effort to get back at the two by kidnapping Angela, so that she can be worked back into the story, since the script has given her nothing to do up to this point.   

Am I really giving away the plot when it's pretty much predetermined when it comes to this genre?  Once all the plot points and characters are set up in the first 15 minutes, the audience feels like they are way ahead of the characters.  Will Ben and James start out hating each other, but end up as friends by the end?  Will most of the cops who are working on the Omar case alongside James end up being dirty and getting paid off by the villain?  Will James give Ben permission to marry her sister?  Will the sun rise in the East and set in the West tomorrow?  You already know the answers.  What amazes me is that it took four separate writers to work on this script.  I imagine most of their work involved diving in various dumpsters for old script pages, crossing off the old names and putting in the new ones, and maybe changing a line of dialogue or two.

The thing is, Hart proves himself a capable comedic actor here.  While I may not be a fan of his style of humor, I do have to admit that he is energetic here, and seems more than able of carrying a film.  He just needs to find a project that isn't cobbled together from other material.  He's obviously giving this script more effort than it deserves.  The other actors spend most of their time standing around, so that Hart can do his material.  They know that this is his movie.  I can only hope that if this does lead to more leading roles for the guy, that he chooses his future projects a bit more carefully.  A few more as generic as this, and I don't think his fans will be as eager to show up.

I have no doubt that Ride Along will have one big weekend, then pretty much fade from everyone's mind, as Kevin Hart goes on to do bigger and hopefully better things.  I'm pulling for the guy.  I want to like him.  He proves here that he has the energy to hold an audience's attention in a lead role.  Now he just has to find a real script tailored to his talents.

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