- Kevin Hart and Ice Cube in Ride Along
“The death of Hollywood is Mel Brooks and special effects,” Joseph L. Mankiewicz once said. “If Mel Brooks had come up in my day he wouldn’t have qualified to be a busboy.” As much as Brooks makes me laugh, I understand why Mankiewicz singled him out as a target for bile. The writer-director of A Letter to Three Wives approached film comedy with the same literacy and formal ambition he brought to social drama (some of his early producing credits included Fritz Lang’s Fury and Frank Borzage’s Three Comrades). Even a relative trifle like People Will Talk builds to some rather thoughtful questions about how we live our lives. Blazing Saddles—a grab bag of movie parodies, sight gags, and pretty much anything else Brooks and his writers found funny—must have looked to Mankiewicz like graffiti on the remains of the studio system he once helped support.
When Mel Brooks staged slack re-creations of genre movie conventions, typically it was to make fun of them. Even though Ride Along seems incapable of taking anything seriously, it isn’t a spoof of 80s buddy-cop movies like 48 Hrs. or Lethal Weapon (which would be superfluous anyway, as those films are already jokey and self-aware). Rather, it uses the generic framework because it contains lots of familiar scenes for the cast to riff on. I guess that’s not so bad if you like Ice Cube and Kevin Hart and all you want to do is spend time with them—to be fair, I found them both to be pleasant screen presences. But I don’t know if I like any actors enough to watch them fire jokes into a void for 100 minutes.
