Ride Along 2 movie review: don’t get in this car

So Kevin Hart is basically the black Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Except he’s supposed to be an actual member of the Atlanta police department here, which is appalling. Ride Along 2 may not be working under the same disgusting premise as the first film — that Ice Cube’s cop is entitled to vet the man his sister is going to marry — but the idea that a clumsy doofus like Hart’s (Get Hard) Ben Barber would be entrusted with the public safety, not to mention a semiautomatic weapon, is a close second. This time, Detective James Payton (Ice Cube: 22 Jump Street) takes along Ben, a rookie still on probation from the academy, to do some sleuthing in Miami; this is but the first of numerous dubious police procedures. They are hunting down a hacker (Ken Jeong: The DUFF), who might be able to help with an Atlanta case, but they end up in the middle of something even bigger, or so the tedious, unfunny script insists; the lame, by-the-numbers buddy-cop-comedy shenanigans are so familiar you’ll swear you’ve seen them all before. Everyone hates everyone else, which could have comedic potential but you’d never know it here: James is still trying to get his sister (Tika Sumpter: What’s Your Number?) to see what a moron Ben is, even as she is putting the final preparations on the wedding, but it seems she already knows and insists on marrying him anyway, for reasons that make no sense except by the calculus of dumb movies like this one, which requires all stupid, unworthy male protagonists to end up with hot babes. (The joke may end up being on him, however: she’s a nasty bridezilla, which doesn’t bode well for the marriage.) Perhaps the least plausible thing in a movie crammed with idiocy? Ice Cube keeps threatening to shoot Kevin Hart in the face, and he never does.