Starring Ice Cube and Kevin Hart. Rated PG. Now playing.

The incredible, auto-mythologizing Straight Outta Compton both celebrated and exemplified Ice Cube’s gifts as a movie star. He gets solid returns on budgets, provides movies with more texture and supporting-cast heft than they might need given their genre, and sticks to his strengths as a performer, principally an ability to glower like no one else. This is not a guy who seems to be chasing an Oscar. He just wants to give you a good Ice Cube movie.

With this sequel, Ride Along becomes his newest franchise. Directed by Tim Story, who also did 2002's loose, funny Barbershop with Cube, it's a buddy-cop action comedy of the sort that you have seen approximately infinity times before.

It is also, of course, a good Ice Cube movie.

As tough detective James Payton, Cube is the straight man. He gives all of the comic business over to Kevin Hart as his annoying junior partner Ben Barber. In this episode, the pair war over upcoming nuptials that will make them brothers-in-law, while also trying to get evidence on a shipping magnate (Benjamin Bratt) who has ventured into the international arms business. They are helped/hurt in this task by Ken Jeong as a hacker and Olivia Munn as a no-nonsense Miami cop.

The crime plot actually holds together reasonably well and there are chases and stunts that would not feel out of place in a regular thriller. But the actual hook in these movies, as far as I can tell, is that Barber is so thoroughly out of his depth that even he is unaware that he is secretly a genius. He is high strung and freewheeling, capable of instantly perceiving a novel solution to an immediate crisis, and then causing another, worse crisis immediately thereafter. He is a hero fool, albeit with great abs.

While Ride Along 3 will surely follow the formula that made the first movie a record-setting January release, Barber is such a strange, event-generating phenomenon that it would be fun to liberate him from a crime movie and just follow him around for awhile. Enough silliness will result, justifying an epic scowl.