Bad Boys: Ride or Die has a troubling case of franchise cancer

polygon.com:

Cancer is often described in layman’s terms as the body’s cells performing their function, just without any of the biological checks and balances that keep them from interfering with or overtaking one another. I’ve found it a useful metaphor for franchise cinema lately, and what can happen when it goes wrong: A film’s franchise elements metastasize and overtake a movie, trying to reinforce intellectual property at every turn, refusing to let a scene go by without some kind of callback, meta joke, or attempt to make fetch happen.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the fourth in the series of buddy-cop movies Michael Bay originated in 1995, seems like an unlikely victim of franchise cancer. The pleasure of a Bad Boys movie — as much as that can be discerned from a film series with a decade or more between previous entries — mostly comes from watching its two uniquely gifted comedic leads, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, engaging in antics under the direction of some of cinema’s foremost explosion-lovers. But in Ride or Die, the joys of Smith and Lawrence’s characters getting on each other’s nerves during improbably explosive shootouts is constantly derailed, as the script workshops or retcons every previous element from prior movies into the grand scheme of this one.

Bad Boys for Life’s Belgian directing duo, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Ms. Marvel) return for Ride or Die, which immediately follows the previous film. Detectives Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) are still trigger-happy Miami narcotics cops who play by their own rules. But they’ve got more backing these days, from AMMO support-squad members Kelly and Dorn (returning cast members Vanessa Hudgens and Alexander Ludwig), and their immediate boss, Lt. Rita Secada (Paola Núñez). They also get lots of reminders to slow down. Mike, the looser of the two loose cannons, is finally settling down and getting married, while Marcus has a near-death experience that has everyone telling him to diet and chill