Review

'Get Hard' is hardly entertaining

Will Ferrell plays an investment broker looking at a lengthy prison sentence in first-time director Etan Cohen’s Get Hard.
Will Ferrell plays an investment broker looking at a lengthy prison sentence in first-time director Etan Cohen’s Get Hard.

Here in Philadelphia, we take the business of our national celebrities very seriously. The line to get into Will Ferrell and Philly native Kevin Hart's new ribald, controversial comedy started 90 minutes before showtime and by the 45-minute mark saw the crowd lined up around the other side of the block.

This was a somewhat warmer reception -- in anticipation, at least -- than the film got at its South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival premiere the previous week in Austin, Texas, an event reportedly pockmarked by an extremely uncomfortable post-screening Q and A session with first-time feature director Etan Cohen, in which one patron declared the film offensive and questioned the director's choice to make such a film in the first place.

Get Hard

68 Cast: Kevin Hart, Will Ferrell, Alison Brie, Craig T. Nelson, Edwina Findley Dickerson

Director: Etan Cohen

Rating: R, for pervasive crude and sexual content and language, some graphic nudity and drug material

Running time: 100 minutes

In its tireless promo campaign, the film is pitted as a racial comedy -- a rich white guy gets sentenced to prison and hires a black man who he assumes is a former con to help prep him for the experience -- but, in truth, the film is more or less equally mocking of both groups. No, you could say Get Hard does reasonably well by its two main ethnicities; it's the film's penchant for rampant misogyny and blatant homophobia that should earn it significant disparagement. That and the fact that it's simply not terribly funny.

The white guy is James King (Ferrell), a wizardly investment broker working at the high-powered brokerage of his soon-to-be father-in-law, Martin (Craig T. Nelson), and making a daily killing. Surrounded by extreme luxury, a passel of servants, and the shapely beauty of his fiancee, Alissa (Alison Brie), Martin's daughter, James has the world by the tail until he gets arrested for suspicion of multiple counts of fraud and embezzlement and after a whirlwind court proceeding with a particularly harsh judge, suddenly finds himself facing 10 years in San Quentin, a maximum security pen.

Left by a scorning Alissa, doused in shame for a crime he insists he's innocent of, James finds himself with nowhere to turn. In desperation, he hires Darnell (Hart), the owner of the car washing service his firm employs and possibly the only black man with whom he's in regular contact, under the erroneous assumption that Darnell has served hard time, to show him the ropes so he can survive in jail. Supposed hilarity ensues when Darnell, who needs $30,000 in order for his family to move out of rough-and-tumble Crenshaw and into a better neighborhood, takes James up on his offer and is soon trying to show this clueless white man about life in the pen, a subject he knows next to nothing about himself.

Since it involves a rich white dude and a black hustler, you could say the film owes a fair amount to Trading Places, the classic Eddie Murphy/Dan Aykroyd farce, but whereas Aykroyd's character, Louis Winthorpe III, truly is an Ivy League snoot and maintains his posh accent and haughty manner throughout his ordeal, Ferrell's character vacillates senselessly from being a smug blowhard (one canonized Ferrell standby) to a sentimental, guileless goof (the other Ferrell staple) as dictated from scene to scene. Hart's Darnell fares no better: His wife, Rita (Edwina Findley Dickerson), scoffs at his ability to play a thug, but literally overnight, he has perfected a street-tough persona and has turned James' Bel Air mansion into a prison facsimile, keeping his client behind bars down in the wine cellar and turning his tennis court into a makeshift prison yard.

The clumsy setup in place, Cohen lets loose with a script brimming with prison-rape jokes, gay sex jokes -- in the film's most cringe-worthy scene, Darnell convinces James to try performing oral sex on a man in the bathroom of a gay-friendly restaurant in order for him to get used to his coming prison treatment, an act that James simply can't bring himself to consecrate -- and blatant female-trolling. Other than Rita, who's given precious little screen time except to shake her head at her man's continuing folly, every other female character is a conniving, money-grubbing wench, a shirtless white supremacist or a bubble-butted black woman who spends the vast majority of her scenes twerking on command.

To make matters worse, even the comedic chemistry between Ferrell and Hart too often seems forced and contrived. Both men have the audacity and talent to be outrageously funny, and Ferrell is normally a perfect foil to a tag-team partner, but neither man is able to escape the demands of Cohen's script ("credited" also to Jay Martel and Ian Roberts, to use the term loosely) to bring much in the way of inspired bits. One scene, in which Hart portrays a triumvirate of prison characters each fighting over James in the tennis court prison yard feels as if it should have been much more inventive and explosive, a welcome chance for the comedian to tear up the screen, but instead he sticks to tired stereotypes and the scene drags along like one of those failed Saturday Night Live skits in which you can practically feel the inspiration bleed out of it.

As far as Hart goes, my Philly brethren might strongly disagree with me, but I would say the jury is still very much out. As a stand-up, he can work comic magic, free to rip everything from race to sex relations, but his films, which he's churning out at an impressive pace (this film would be his eighth since 2013) are far too often barely half-realized and schlocky. He certainly wouldn't be the first stage comic whose filmography is at best sketchy -- one only needs to behold the wonderment of Kevin James' unending string of duds or much of the comic narrative work of Richard Pryor, a certified stand-up genius -- but if he wants to be remembered for anything more than his stand-up, he'd better start to take his foot off the gas pedal a bit and find something he can really sink his considerable talents into, else he forever be saddled with weak scripts such as this, and afterthought characters to portray. He'd make a decent living either way, but if he's not careful, the considerable body of his work is doomed to become eminently forgettable.

MovieStyle on 03/27/2015

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