Amazon’s Ride or Die Could Revitalize An Underrated Trope
A competent spy paired up with her hapless best friend? Groundbreaking.
Judith (Hannah Waddingham) and Debbie (Octavia Spencer) have been thick as thieves for 20 years, the rare kind of friendship that’s taken them through multiple eras of their lives. They’ve been everywhere together, know everything about each other, and keep no secrets.
Well, maybe one.
Judith, it turns out, is a highly skilled assassin on the international stage. And for the past few decades, she’s been able to keep her work wholly separate from her personal life and her relationship with Debbie. But compartmentalization doesn’t exactly make for good TV: in real life (if hit men even exist in real life), Judith might have lived her entire life with this secret under wraps. But in Ride or Die, Prime Video’s new eight-episode action-comedy series, it all inevitably blows up in her face, pitching these inseparable best friends into a misadventure neither could ever be prepared for.
With its first trailer, Ride or Die teases the return of a trope that’s gone a bit defunct within the spy thriller: “Oh yeah, I’m a spy!” Pairing up a seasoned assassin with the civilian they’ve been keeping their secret identity from is an evergreen aspect of the genre, but recent films and shows have mostly failed to capture the true fun of it. Apple TV’s Ghosted might be the most recent, and the less said about that mind-numbing film, the better. A better example of the trope came with the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz two-hander Knight and Day — and it’s been years since anything of note has topped it.
Ride or Die probably won’t become the new paragon of competent spy/hapless civilian storytelling, but it’s still nice to see such an intriguing duo taking on a subgenre with so much potential. Spencer’s comedic chops are underrated in themselves, so it’ll be fun to see how she juggles this show’s zany tone with brutal action. Her Debbie isn’t all that innocent, either: as Judith reveals in the trailer, her husband is in deep with the mob, planting a target on her back that’s more than her proximity to her friend. With names like Ed Skrein and Bill Nighy in the mix, Ride or Die is poised to be a solid riff on a trope that’s long needed more love.
