Get Hard

You can tell that Get Hard was largely improvised by its two stars, Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart.  The movie itself has little to no plot, and is basically built around a lot of scenes where the two comic actors are playing off each other.  There are some scenes where this approach works, and I found myself laughing.  But there are also moments that fall completely flat.  The end result is an uneven movie that works some of the time, and not so well the rest.

To be fair, this movie is a big improvement over some other recent adult-oriented comedies that I have sat through lately, like Unfinished Business and Hot Tub Time Machine 2.  The fact that the movie contains some actual laughs puts it in a league far above those two films.  Heck, if the movie only had one laugh, it would be seen as an improvement.  Fortunately, Farrell and Hart do play off of one another quite well, and create some funny rapid fire dialogue.  But sometimes, you can almost see them floundering as they try to make the material they have to do funny.  This is what ultimately holds back the film.  These guys can only do so much.  They need support from the script, and I don't think it's fully there.  The stuff that does work I credit to Farrell and Hart, as they almost seem to be making it up on the spot.  If director and co-writer Etan Cohen (Tropic Thunder) was smart, he would have just let the two stars rework the entire script on their own.

The set-up: Ferrell plays James King, your standard clueless character that Ferrell specializes in.  He's not breaking any comedic ground here, but he still gets laughs.  James is living the good life as a stockbroker.  He has a huge mansion, a materialistic fiance (Alison Brie), and a boss (and future father-in-law) played by Craig T. Nelson who is preparing to make him a business partner.  Most of the laughs in the early part of the film comes from James' narrow view of the world, and just how wrong he is about everything and everyone around him.  On the other end of the spectrum is Darnell (Hart), a poor working class family man who needs money to get his car wash business off the ground, and put his young daughter in a better school.  The two men seem destined to never truly cross paths (other than a funny awkward encounter in a parking garage early on), but then fate steps in when James is busted by some federal agents for fraud.

James says he is innocent, and believes that the truth will come out, but the judge winds up throwing the book at him, and sentences him to 10 years in San Quentin.  He has 30 days to get his affairs in order before he has to report to prison.  It's around this time that James and Darnell have another run-in with each other, and James offers to pay him if he will help him get ready for prison life.  James is under the mistaken impression that because Darnell is black and he talked about what it's like in San Quentin, that he has served hard time.  Darnell needs the money in order to give his family a better life, so he goes along with it.  As far as comedy premises go, this one's kind of stretching it, but Ferrell and Hart have an easy comedic chemistry with each other, and I enjoyed watching them trading one liners.  Some of the scenes depicting James going through Darnell's "training" for life in a maximum security prison is actually hilarious, especially when he turns James' sprawling mansion into a makeshift prison, with James' staff and servants serving as other inmates or brutal guards.

The scenes where we get to enjoy the interplay between the two leads are what works here.  Unfortunately, there are just as many scenes that either land with a deafening thud, or just aren't funny to begin with.  A good example would be a scene where Ferrell is forced to give a blow job to a random stranger in a bathroom as part of his training.  The scene goes on far too long, and just never builds to any real laugh.  There's also a moment where Ferrell tries to blend in with a white supremacist biker gang that also seems stretched out without really going anywhere.  These scenes seem like set up set pieces provided by the screenplay, and the actors just don't know how to make it work.  This would have been a better movie if it just focused on the offbeat relationship of the two main characters, and did not have to include any outside elements, like the tacked on action climax where the characters try to clear James' name.

Get Hard works from time to time, but it never goes that extra mile and builds into something really special.  We want to see these two leads attached to a better script, one that would be better suited to their improv talents.  The laughs they do get are genuine ones, but it never goes deeper than just one liners.  We never sense a real friendship growing between these two guys.  They sometimes come across as a couple of stand up comedians practicing the shtick together.  It's certainly not bad shtick, but we're still left wanting more.  We want the movie to step in and give these guys real characters to play, and it never does.  There's a promise of this in some scenes, such as when Darnell invites James to his home for dinner, but it never builds to anything satisfying.

I will say that I did enjoy parts of this movie, but not enough to fully recommend it, and I constantly felt like there should be even more to it.  The actors do the very best they can with this material, and probably give it more than it deserves.  Should this movie prove to be a hit with audiences, it will be entirely thanks to them.

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