Get Hard *** (2015, Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Alison Brie) – Movie Review

Will Ferrell teams with Kevin Hart in a patchy comedy where the good patches are very good and the bad patches are very bad. It’s a score of about 50/50, with a very bright start and the dross all in the middle of the movie. For all its shortcomings, the Hangover crowd are well catered for. Ferrell and Hart prove a pretty good comedy double act, with Ferrell raising Hart’s game.

Ferrell plays James King, a millionaire Los Angeles financier who’s about to marry the gold-digging daughter (Alison Brie) of his boss (Craig T Nelson) when he’s framed for embezzlement and fraud, and sentenced to years in prison in San Quentin. The scared rich white bloke turns to Darnell Lewis (Kevin Hart), who he wrongly thinks has been inside and is tough, to prep him to go behind bars.

It’s such a shame with a movie where there are so many funny lines and a fired-up Ferrell star turn that there are also so many lame jokes about prison rape and gay panic. Joking about forcible sex really isn’t great even in a bad-taste comedy, but that’s really the whole movie, so that one joke is repeated over and over. Racial discrimination, income inequality and gay men are also up for a comic work-over, so not everybody’s going to be on this movie’s side.

Yes, it’s the racists, the actual corrupt rich folk and panicky, homophobic straight guys who are supposed to be the targets of the fun, but it’s a fine line that not everyone will get. There is s smarter, funnier movie somewhere here, but co-writer/director Etan Cohen wants to go for broke downmarket and grossout in the hunt for a big hit. But it’s fairly safe to assume that that is what Cohen and Ferrell have here.

John Mayer appears as himself at Ferrell’s wedding party, but that joke doesn’t turn out to be one of the movie’s funniest.

Cohen is the writer of Tropic Thunder (2008), Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008) and Men in Black 3 (2012),  and this is his first feature as director.

It will be no surprise that there is pervasive crude and sexual content and language, some graphic nudity, and drug material.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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