2/5 Get Hard Get ready for yet another barren week at the multiplex. When will this draught end? I will admit I was not expecting much from last week’s releases, so that mediocrity did not sting as much. This week stings. Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart are two of the funniest, most beloved people on the planet. Who wouldn’t get excited for a bro-comedy that paired them together. Sadly, we can go back to fantasizing about a Ferrell/Hart comedy that is actually worth watching, because this sure is not it. Get Hard is not a plot movie; it’s a premise movie. Like all Kevin Hart comedies these days, the foundation of the story is a combo of the comic’s fast-talking schtick and one joke stretched to feature length. The extended joke here is that Will Ferrell’s Wall Street mogul is really scared of being raped in jail. Down to the movie’s title, every last gag points back to that same joke. We see stretch marks long before the 100 minute running time is up. There is a loose conflict about Ferrell’s James trying to prove that he was not guilty of fraud and that he was framed by his soon-to-be father-in-law (Craig T. Nelson) and finance (Community and Mad Men's Alison Brie, given absolutely nothing to do), but by this point the movie is completely off the rails. | Director: Etan Cohen Starring: Kevin Hart, Will Ferrell, Craig T. Nelson, Alison Brie, T.I. Wriers: Etan Cohen, Jay Martel, Ian Roberts |
I cannot seem to decide if comedies these days are offensive or just ignorant. It is probably a bit of both, and most tend to lean farther in one direction. Get Hard lands close to the middle, with a lean to the offensive. You get the feeling that all of this racial profiling and gay-panic is supposed to be some type of satire, but the jokes are so dull, dumb, and naive that it’s hard to believe they serve any higher purpose. But here is my quarrel: Director Etan Cohen wrote Ben Stiller’s epic showbiz satire Tropic Thunder, so he obviously knows how the device works. Maybe celebrity excess is an easier beast to tackle than the more complex race and gay topics, but any movie that takes three experienced screenwriters to write should be able to mine some edgy material from the lone-joke premise.
For an industry filled with people who claim to be so progressive, their sure are a lot of big studio movies that come out every year that rely heavily on homophobic humor. Get Hard might be one of the most blatant examples of this trend. Without the dreadful cloud of gay sex, there would literally be no movie here. Not that I spend a lot of time pondering it, but I cannot think of film more obsessed with anal penetration than Get Hard. It is literally all they talk about. If you enjoy half-baked comedies and have a longstanding fear of prison rape, this is the movie for you.
I could go into a similar argument about the excess of racial profiling in movies today, but did anyone really expect a movie called Get Hard to follow in the path of film’s - like last year’s Top Five - that are getting big laughs out of genuine respect for a people’s culture. A few blackface jokes are made, but is it really any different than a clean-cut white dude wearing saggy pants and acting “thug.” Like I said earlier, there is the smallest hint of satire; but the execution is a massive blunder at best.
A tiny portion of the jokes land on their feet, but who are we kidding? We came to see these two actors interact; we were just hoping for funny jokes. On this front, the film is a minor success. Neither comedian breaks from their usual routine - Hart with the motormouthed black guy whose not as hard as everyone thinks he is and Ferrell with the oblivious man-boy act -, but at least the two established personas meld together smoothly. There is genuine chemistry between the two; it’s a shame it was wasted on such a trite film.
For an industry filled with people who claim to be so progressive, their sure are a lot of big studio movies that come out every year that rely heavily on homophobic humor. Get Hard might be one of the most blatant examples of this trend. Without the dreadful cloud of gay sex, there would literally be no movie here. Not that I spend a lot of time pondering it, but I cannot think of film more obsessed with anal penetration than Get Hard. It is literally all they talk about. If you enjoy half-baked comedies and have a longstanding fear of prison rape, this is the movie for you.
I could go into a similar argument about the excess of racial profiling in movies today, but did anyone really expect a movie called Get Hard to follow in the path of film’s - like last year’s Top Five - that are getting big laughs out of genuine respect for a people’s culture. A few blackface jokes are made, but is it really any different than a clean-cut white dude wearing saggy pants and acting “thug.” Like I said earlier, there is the smallest hint of satire; but the execution is a massive blunder at best.
A tiny portion of the jokes land on their feet, but who are we kidding? We came to see these two actors interact; we were just hoping for funny jokes. On this front, the film is a minor success. Neither comedian breaks from their usual routine - Hart with the motormouthed black guy whose not as hard as everyone thinks he is and Ferrell with the oblivious man-boy act -, but at least the two established personas meld together smoothly. There is genuine chemistry between the two; it’s a shame it was wasted on such a trite film.