Yep, all the elements: same stars, same director … same story, really. Ben (Hart) is now a beat cop in the Atlanta PD, hoping to make detective one day and partner with his soon-to-be-brother-in-law James (Cube). When James has to go to Miami to follow a lead picked up off a recently arrested drug dealer, he decides to let Ben ride along again, if only so the little guy might finally realise he doesn’t have what it takes to be a detective and stop banging on about it. None of this matters much. In many ways you want a police comedy to have a clichéd buddy-cop plot, because it’s supposed to be riffing on the format, and the point is to appropriate its standard signifiers and build jokes around them. The problem is this, though: Ice Cube wears sunglasses pretty much all the time. Even indoors, and at night. Probably for a good 70% of the film. Now, I don’t begrudge a man wearing sunglasses to excess, least of all Ice Cube. He’d be more than welcome to come round for Sunday lunch, and if he insisted on keeping his eyes shaded throughout, he’d be no less so. But in Ride Along 2 they act as a barrier between him and Hart, stifling the back-and-forth which made the first outing such a success. See for example when they’re driving, and Hart is rattling on about giving themselves the nickname “the brothers-in-law” to make them more badass. “You say that again, I’m-a shoot you in the face,” Cube tells him. It’s the sort of line that isn’t funny on its own because it isn’t a joke: it needs context, and for the short length of his fuse to be made plain. Shuttered behind two Ray-ban lenses, it’s just a man threatening to shoot his sister’s fiancé in the face, and it’s about as funny. This is an unfathomable decision, and I’d be fascinated to know whether it was Cube or director Tim Story who made it. Though he did a bang-up job two years ago I suspect Story, because this sequel is littered with odd choices and missed opportunities. There’s a classic sight gag set-up for Hart – a brilliant physical comedian – to flail about like a maniac as he’s being attacked by an alligator on the other side of a set of glass doors while Cube talks calmly and obliviously to a waitress inside. The way this works, has always worked, is that you get laughs by editing it in such a way that it juxtaposes the silence in the room with the panic outside, but there’s needless incidental music over the top of it and the cuts miss all the right beats. It’s ruined. There are laughs here, but nowhere near enough, and it’s a shame. You can’t expect too much of a comedy franchise built on a ropey old template, but the first film raised my hopes too high. I’d have been perfectly happy with a straight-up retread as long as it maintained the two central characters’ dynamic. But acting, as Laurence Olivier almost certainly once said, is all in the eyes, and all Ice Cube had to do was show us his. You tell him; I’ll totally back you up.