At The Movies: Flashy action in Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, gentle satire of Showing Up

Bad Boys: Ride Or Die (NC16)

115 minutes, opens on June 20
3 stars

The story: When their late boss Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) is posthumously implicated in cartel crimes, wisecracking buddy cops Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) set out to clear his name.

Bad Boys: Ride Or Die opens with Mike’s wedding, where excited best man Marcus has a heart attack. He recovers from a near-death experience convinced he is invincible and that Mike was his donkey in a past life.

The bad boys are pushing 60. In the face of marriage and mortality, they remain ever juvenile in a 29-year Hollywood blockbuster franchise as dumb and loud as only Michael Bay can make it – and ticket-buyers would not want their popcorn escapism any other way.

The Moroccan-Belgian duo credited as Adil & Bilall took over the directing after American film-maker Bay’s pair of Bad Boys (1995) and Bad Boys II (2003).

This action-comedy fourquel brings back the guns and explosions, as the detective duo find themselves framed while investigating corruption within their ranks, on the run from their own Miami Police Department and the whole of law enforcement. Worse, the Mexican cartel has a bounty on their heads.

The menacing convict (Jacob Scipio) sprung from prison to help them solve the conspiracy is the captain’s assassin from the previous instalment, Bad Boys For Life (2020).

He is also Mike’s long-lost son.

The series is by now as much soap opera as it is a sitcom, almost a parody. Smith and Lawrence bicker like an old married couple, and their bromance is still a winning formula. Athough the biggest attraction by far, at 400kg, is arguably an albino alligator named Duke that cameos in the climactic amusement park shoot-out.

Hot take: It is the flashy trigger-happy 1990s all over again, for better or worse.

Showing Up (M18)

108 minutes, opens at The Projector on June 20
4 stars

The story: A sculptor (Michelle Williams) prepares for a solo show amid the competing demands of family and friends.

There will be no flashes of inspiration, no sparks of genius. American indie cinema darling Kelly Reichardt is the bard of the quotidian, and Showing Up is a droll serio-comedy of a ceramicist named Lizzy, so distracted by mundane dramas she barely has time for her art. The director’s muse, Williams, returns from Wendy And Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Certain Women (2016) to star.

Lizzy mediates between her divorced parents (Judd Hirsch and Maryann Plunkett) and frets over her delusional recluse brother (John Magaro), while working a thankless day job as her mother’s administrator assistant at an arts college in Portland, Oregon.

At home, she nurses a pigeon mauled by her cat.

And she badly needs a hot shower. Her increasingly agitated reminders to get her water heater fixed are brushed aside by her self-absorbed landlady-neighbour Jo (Hong Chau), who is a popular installation artist busy basking in the success of two exhibitions.

And here is grumpy, frumpy, introverted Lizzy, toiling alone in obscurity in her garage on her delicate clay figurines.

Will anyone even show up for her gallery opening?

Reichardt’s gentle, minimalist satire is like the heroine, easy to overlook.

Nonetheless, it was recognised by the US National Board of Review as one of 2023’s top independent films. The movie is candid about the frustrations and resentments within the insular art community – frenemies Lizzy and Jo’s perfectly played rivalry is the central comic relationship – but also art-making as a spiritual vocation.

Hot take: This is a wryly observed account of an artist’s life and how life gets in the way of art.