If you’re happy with all that, then Ride Along is for you.  If you’re wavering, let me try a pitch to sum up the film’s deft play with narrative and genre convention.  Here goes: ‘Kevin Hart and Ice Cube go on a ride along’.  No?  Come on … Let me start over with nicer words.  Ride Along is actually pretty funny when it wants to be.  Especially when it lets Kevin Hart be Kevin Hart, rather than shrill comic relief guy.  Hart has been stealing scenes with just the briefest of screen time in recent years – Death at a Funeral, 40 Year Old Virgin, Scary Movie 4 (and yes, I realise it probably wasn’t a stretch to be the best thing in Scary Movie 4, but still …).  Ride Along gives him due reward for all that.  There’s not a joke that lands when he’s off screen, not a moment to remember outside of some clumsily orchestrated violence and a casual misogyny in how the film features a woman in peril wearing just a vest and tight shorts (the 90s did happen, right?). Comedy pratfalls, rapid fire delivery, macho posturing, sympathetic figure – director Tim Story and the film’s five writers (!) throw everything his way and he hits it all out the park.  If there’s any justice Ride Along 2 will feature 89 minutes of Hart, and one minute of Ice Cube looking scornful and then saying ‘Damn!’.   What’s curious is whether Story knows how meta he’s being here.  Early on in the film, Bruce McGill’s police captain berates Ice Cube’s renegade cop for being just a slightly bit over the top in destroying half the city to catch a petty thief.  ‘This isn’t a video game’, he yells, ‘there are consequences’.  Ride Along is a film entirely free of consequence.  Nothing matters.  Is Story enjoying his own private joke in seeing America flock to a film that points a finger at the obsession with video game violence and misogyny?Probably not.  But just thinking about that does enough to fill the gaps when Kevin Hart goes AWOL. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.