Kevin Hart’s Ride Along 2 dominates the box office this MLK weekend.
Kevin Hart and Ice Cube have a lot to celebrate this MLK weekend. According to early reports, the Atlanta and Miami filmed action-comedy, Ride Along 2, is the number one movie in America.
The $40 million sequel featuring Kevin Hart, Ice Cube and Ken Jeong is one of the biggest movies this weekend beating Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Academy Award nominated movie, The Revenant in the box office.
Despite, lower reviews than the first Ride Along, the buddy cop comedy is expected to make $48.6 million dollars this weekend.
“Ride Along 2” centers on Kevin Hart and Ice Cube as a security guard turned Atlanta cop who just finished solving a major crime in Atlanta and is looking to prove himself to his future Brother-in Law (Ice Cube). “Ride Along 2? featured Kevin Hart, Tika Sumpter and Ice Cube as the two travel to Miami to stop a criminal enterprise. Ice Cube produced the project along with Will Packer, Matt Alvarez and Larry Brezner.
Critics were not that happy with the movie in comparison to the first Ride Along. In fact, Rotten Tomatoes gives the movie a 14% rating and a critical consensus of “Ride Along 2 presents a cop-comedy sequel whose well-matched stars can’t break the law of diminishing returns — or lock up a script that unabashedly steals from the original.”
Matt Bronson of Creative Loafing said this about Ride Along 2: “The studio’s strategy: Hire the same director, employ the services of a couple of the same writers, offer the same standard-issue plotting and similar comic riffs, and then kick back and practice saying, “Show me the money.”
BOX OFFICE: Michael Bay’s 13 Hours disappoints…
Meanwhile, Michael Bay’s 13 Hours has slipped in the box office to only fourth place. According to reports, the movie will only make half as much as Ride Along 2 with only $20 million, which is severely disappointing considering Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper earned $107.2 million and both movies used the same marketing decisions by targeting political conservatives.
13 Hours centered around a political terrorist attack in 2012 against the U.S. Embassy compound in Benghazi that left four people dead including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Peter Travers with the Rolling Stone says this about 13 Hours, “Several critics have given 13 Hours a pass, citing Bay’s skill at action engineering. It’s his failure at everything else that makes this movie as hard to endure as it is impossible to believe. #helpme”
“It’s his failure at everything else that makes this movie as hard to endure as it is impossible to believe. #helpme”
Regardless, Ride Along 2 is beating out Leonardo DiCaprio’s Academy Award nominating performance, and Michael Bay’s action-political thriller 13 Hours in the box office showing the world that Kevin Hart still makes people laugh.
