Will Smith in Bad Boys: Ride or Die Credit – Courtesy of Sony Pictures
Even beyond the sparkling interior quality that marks a true movie star, actors are paid to play characters, not just buffed and polished versions of themselves. When we talk about “likable” actors, we’re responding to a performer’s ability to translate certain qualities onscreen. Our job as viewers is to be alive to their expressiveness, to the beauty of their features whether classical or quirky, to the way they swagger, slouch, or dance. We have the freedom to love the creation without having to wrestle with the human complexities of its creator.
But what happens when we learn too much about what an actor is really like? And why, even though we know better, do we still feel a little betrayed when we hear, say, Christian Bale berating a cinematographer on a leaked recording, or, worse, learn that Henry Fonda, an actor who gave a human face to civic-minded ideals, had little tenderness to spare ? Actors aren’t our friends, yet our relationship with them can be more complicated than friendship. What happens when an actor behaves in a way that makes us recoil from the essence of the actor-viewer bond: the mere sight of his face?
Bad Boys: Ride or Die isn’t first movie since , when he strode up from his seat and hard across the face, after Rock made an about the shaved head of . Smith has appeared in one other movie since then, Antoine Fuqua’s slave drama . But Bad Boys: Ride or Die—the fourth entry in a series that kicked off with 1995’s Bad Boys, when Smith and his costar Martin Lawrence were practically just kids—isn’t a drama but an action comedy, the kind of movie designed to draw a wide audience, and as such it’s Smith’s first major theatrical release since 2022. Smith has always been capable of bringing a worldwide audience to the big screen. The previous Bad Boys installment, Bad Boys for Life, released in January 2020, roughly two months before the pandemic brought moviegoing to a halt, made $426 million globally. Thanks at least in part to that pandemic pause, Bad Boys for Life ended up being the top-grossing movie of the year.
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