Male Friendships Get Messy, Female Friendships Must Prove Plot

"Ride or Die" is a heist-comedy about two best friends—a con artist and a hairdresser—who get tangled with an assassin guild while trying to escape the country. Critics have called the structure sloppy because the emotional stakes don't quite land.

The film is enjoyable enough. But the real question is whether "fun enough" is permitted to excuse certain kinds of failure depending on whose friendship story you're watching.

"Superbad" (2007) has a gossamer-thin plot—two high school friends want to buy alcohol and go to a party. Critics didn't call it sloppy. They called it authentic, treating the looseness as a service to intimacy rather than a structural failure.

When the Coen Brothers made "The Nice Guys" (2016), the buddy dynamic between a private detective and a con man required almost no exposition and invited plot confusion. Nobody minded. But watch what happens when the same permission isn't extended backward. "Ride or Die" gets the criticism that your plotting is too loose, your emotional beats don't justify the structure. You're relying on set pieces to cover narrative gaps.

The film may have genuine structural problems, or it may have simply tried something similar and encountered a different standard. We've collectively decided that male friendships earn their messy structure through character, while female friendships need to prove their worth through plot first. One is treated as authentically human. The other has to earn that right.

we've collectively decided that male friendships earn their messy structure through character, while female friendships need to prove their worth through plot first