Movies

Ice Cube and Kevin Hart’s ‘Ride’ falls short

“Ride Along” tries to be a comic version of “Training Day,” only there’s nothing in it as funny as Denzel razzing Ethan. There’s nothing much funny in it at all.

Ice Cube plays James, a cop who can’t stand Kevin Hart, which is pretty easy to imagine, only unlike Cube I still couldn’t stand Hart at the end. Hart plays Ben, a Paul Blart type who dreams of being a supercop and eagerly agrees to go on a daylong ride with James, the kind of tough undercover man for whom a routine investigation into some forged passports somehow turns into a shootout and a drive through a fireball.

Cube’s James doesn’t want his beautiful sister Angela (Tika Sumpter) to marry Ben, a half-pint gamer nerd who calls himself “Blackhammer” on his super-soldier video game and once set fire to James at a barbecue. So the cop figures he’ll haze the younger man for a day and this will somehow keep the little guy from becoming his brother-in-law.

The movie depends entirely on how funny you think Kevin Hart is. All I see is a twitchy little rooster who needs to switch to decaf or remove his finger from the nearest electrical outlet. He jerks and jukes his way through the movie, begging us to laugh and crashing into stationary objects. His models seem to be Chris Tucker and Eddie Murphy, but Tucker was infused with nuttiness whereas Hart just seems to be trying too hard. He’d do better learning some of Murphy’s ’80s cool.

The script rumbles along from one little-guy joke after another. James sends Ben to ask some biker outlaws to move their hogs, and li’l Ben is immediately surrounded by menacingly large, hairy dudes. There’s nowhere to go with that scene except for a lame gag about a bearded lady, so we move on to a playground where Ben gets in an argument with a small child who bests him. Then, it’s on to a shooting range where Ben is so wee he gets thrown against the wall by the kick from firing a shotgun.

Cube is a pro at playing gruff and street-smart, so it’s tiresome to watch him reduced to lobbing lazy insults at his motor-mouthed would-be partner. “He’s about one chromosome away from being a midget” is the best of these. If small stature, together with talking fast and occasionally breaking into a high-pitched scream, are all Hart has going for him, I fear his career is going to be . . . short.