Lorne Balfe to Return for Adil & Bilall’s ‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’
Lorne Balfe (Mission: Impossible – Fallout & Dead Reckoning, Black Widow, His Dark Materials, The Wheel of Time, Black Adam, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) is returning to score the upcoming action comedy sequel Bad Boys: Ride or Die. The film is directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah and stars Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Eric Dane, Paola Nuñez, Ioan Gruffudd, Jacob Scipio, Tasha Smith, Melanie Liburd, Tiffany Haddish and Joe Pantoliano. The fourth installment in the action franchise follows Miami’s finest who are now on the run. Chris Bremner (The Man from Toronto) wrote the screenplay. Smith is also producing the project with Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Armageddon), Chad Oman (The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) and Doug Belgrad (Gran Turismo, Charlie’s Angels). Balfe has previously scored the previous 2020 installment Bad Boys for Life directed by Adil & Bilall. Bad Boys: Ride or Die will be released in theaters nationwide on June 7, 2024 by Sony Pictures.
I'm listening to this now - it's the first time I've heard it and I saw the movie yesterday. Just like the last movie, the score was buried in the audio mix and I had to make an effort to try and listen for it. More of it may have actually made it INTO the movie this time, although they handed the end credits over to Balfe in the last movie and weren't so generous this time around.
If the prior entry Bad Boys for Life was a largely faithful resurrection of the legacy Media Ventures sound, this one feels more like 50% that and 50% Lorne's subsequent electronic experiments (Ambulance came to mind), so your enjoyment of the score will probably depend on your tolerance for the latter aspects.
The third track Basement of the Ocean practically takes the theme into Naoki Sato territory, a fascinating stylistic deviation that the album unfortunately treats as a one-off.
