Following their losing effort together "Facade", director Jonathan Morgan and writer Stormy Daniels go back to Stormy's bottom drawer of unused scripts to pass off "Along for the Ride", a tepid entry in the "Ride Along" genre.
I guess you need a big personality like Kevin Hart to pull this stuff off successfully. What we get is an unattractive and untalented player Charlotte Cross, Peter Principled to the leading role as a former child star who can't get arrested in movies as an adult. (Irony: Cross is making Adult movies.) Her agent played by Eric Masterson suggests she do extensive training/research and maybe she'll be cast in a big cop movie "Into the Blue", which could be the career breakthrough she desperately needs.
So he assigns her for a series of ride-alongs with cop Damon Dice, who is the brother of Eric's friend Katie Morgan (great to see the former superstar back in Adult features). Film depicts their misadventures as he does his daily policing routine, and Stormy fails to concoct interesting scenes. Busting a prostitute and her john is hardly original or amusing but typical of the time killer footage, in this case busting Nikki Knightly in fetish gear and hapless customer Tommy Gunn.
SPOILER:
Director Morgan, who has an enviable track record both in front of and behind the camera, completely bungles the more serious content of later reels. There is a serial cop-killer on the loose (ouch, sounds like today's headlines), and Charlotte is in the patrol car when Dice is knocked out by the bad guy, poorly played by Tommy Pistol. This lengthy sequence, which includes time out for Tommy to bang his fellow thrill-killer companion Carter Cruise, is poorly staged and completely stupid. Carter and Pistol overacting like crazy play like a bush-league parody of Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette in "True Romance" and are terrible.
What really sinks the feature is unappealing Cross and totally wooden Dice, who recites his lines without any emotion or evidence of a modicum of acting ability. I know he's hired for his dick, but this is not a gonzo assignment, so he should have been replaced. In the very limited talent pool for story porn "acting" (Gunn and Pistol seem to be in every movie) adding Dice to the roster recently was a big mistake -he's unqualified.
Film's title has an unfortunate double meaning after one sits through the feature - I felt like i'd been taken "along for the ride".
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