Ride Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.0

Ride Blu-ray Movie Review

Don't Accept

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 6, 2018

Ride is the feature debut of writer/director Jeremy Ungar. The film is the expansion of a 15-minute short, and it should have stayed that way. Padding it to a 76-minute running time simply gives the viewer more improbabilities to contemplate.

James (Jessie T. Usher) is an aspiring actor supporting himself as a driver for an Uber-style rideshare service. He picks up Jessica (Bella Thorne), with whom there's enough spark of potential chemistry that she invites him to join her at the club where he drops her off. But James has another call. It's Bruno (Will Brill), who might as well have "psycho" tattooed on his forehead. In a low-rent variation of Collateral, Bruno lures, and ultimately forces, James on a late-night L.A. odyssey that includes robbery, grievous bodily harm and possible murder. Through contrivances that are among Ride's least credible (and that's saying something), Jessica gets pulled into the mix.

Not one thing about Ride is convincing, and the effort to fill out the short has resulted in a lop-sided pacing, where the film takes so long to get going that, by the time Bruno appears and James is placed in jeopardy, the viewer has long since lost interest. The devices that prolong Bruno's terrorizing are dull at best (or just plain inept, like the liquor store robbery). In the short film, which is included as an extra, he retained an air of dangerous mystery. In the longer version, he's just a generic bad guy, and Brill isn't able to imbue him with sufficient charm or menace to make the character interesting. He's just a loser (and likely career criminal) whom any sensible driver should have spotted in time to drive off before he opened the car door.

Ride Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Ride appears to have been digitally photographed; the credited cinematographer is Rob Givens (The Hero). However, the film arrives on RLJ Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray with an image that looks more film-like than traditionally digital, as a result of several factors. First, Givens appears to have matched the nighttime sensitivity of digital cameras with slower anamorphic lenses, which not only soften the image but also create extensive horizontal lens flares, imparting a more classical look than is displayed in the original short photographed by Ernesto Lomali. (For a similar style, review Jan de Bont's lighting in the outdoor scenes of the first Die Hard.) Second, much of the film has been shot through the windscreen and other windows of James's auto, thereby filtering and further softening the image. Third, Givens has used minimal light wherever possible, deliberately crushing the blacks to reduce shadow detail. As soon as the action enters a well-lit locale like the liquor store where Bruno sends James or the all-night drugstore where he sends Jessica, the digital clarity returns.

The disc's low average bitrate of 20.994, with about 6 GB of space left unused on the BD-25, is typical for RLJ, but the encode appears to be capable.

Ride Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

With most of the action confined to the interior of James's auto, Ride's 5.1 soundtrack (encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA) doesn't have much to do. It expands for a few scenes outside the car—inside a club, at the pool and hot tub of an L.A. residence—but mostly it supports and expands the electronic score by Paul Haslinger (Resident Evil: The Final Chapter).

Ride Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Original "Ride" Short Film (1080p; 2.40:1; 15:41): More effective than the feature, although it lacks the professional sheen of Givens' photography and the appeal of actors Thorne and Usher, both of whom have mainstream careers in better projects.



• Photo Gallery (1080p; 1.78:1): A small group of production stills, some surprisingly grainy, probably as a result of being blown up from the original source.



• Introductory Trailers: The film's trailer is not included. At startup, the disc plays trailers for I.T., Bushwick and Terminal.

Ride Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Blu-ray is competently produced, but Ride is a waste of time. Skip it.