124 min | R | January 17, 2020 | Columbia Pictures
Mike and Marcus are Miami cops who are too old for this and know it. A killer from Mike’s past starts clearing the board, and retirement gets put on hold. The plot is nonsense, but the two stars still finish each other’s sentences like no time has passed.
Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett are aging Miami narcotics cops who have been partners across decades and two prior films. A figure from Mike’s buried past begins executing the people connected to a single old case. Mike wants to chase the killer down. Marcus wants to retire, hold his new grandson, and stop nearly dying for a living. Underneath the gunfire, the film is about a man who built his whole identity around being the fastest and most dangerous person in the room, and what happens when that stops being enough.
Will Smith plays Mike as a man performing confidence over a widening crack. He still moves and talks like a star, but Smith lets the vanity read as fear of obsolescence. Martin Lawrence plays Marcus as the conscience and the brake, and his exhaustion is the most honest note in the movie. The two slide back into their rhythm instantly, finishing each other’s complaints and bickering through firefights. Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, and Charles Melton play the young tech-driven AMMO unit, and the script uses them mostly to make the old guard look like dinosaurs who still get the job done. Kate del Castillo plays Isabel Aretas with cold conviction that the broad villain writing does not fully earn.
Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah take over a franchise built by Michael Bay and study his grammar without his hyperactivity. The action is legible. Cars flip and bullets fly, and the camera holds long enough to let you track who is where. One motorcycle-and-sidecar chase through Miami stays coherent across every cut, which is the opposite of the genre’s usual blur. The script by Chris Bremner, Peter Craig, and Joe Carnahan keeps the banter sharp and stacks the mythology of Mike’s past higher than the material can hold.
This is a legacy sequel that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize for it. It coasts on two stars who still have the chemistry, and it lets them admit they are old without slowing down the spectacle. The plot turn at the center is overcooked and the villains stay thin. The film works anyway because Smith and Lawrence make you believe these two men actually need each other.