There's a kernel of a very funny, very smart film tucked away at the center of Get Hard. With Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart doing their thing how can it not be worth a chuckle or two, right? And that the story was dreamed up by Adam McKay, who worked with Ferrell on The Other Guys, a comedy that took white collar criminals to task, Get Hard lightly brushes on many of those same themes. It's the other crap that gets in the way. The oft-repeated gags about prison rape and the frequent racial stereotypes become such a drag that solitary confinement might be a welcome break from it all.
If Get
Hard had come out back in the
1980s it would be looked at in the same way we look at Trading Places. But have you
watched Trading Places lately? The way it looks at race is
pretty old fashioned. Times have changed and that stuff doesn't really fly anymore.
That's not to say jokes can't be made that make light of our differences, but
there is a balance. Unfortunately, the writers behind Get Hard didn't get the memo.
The unfortunate thing is that when it
isn't embracing stereotypes or indulging in stale "gay panic"humor, Get Hard makes some keen and very funny
observations about race, upward mobility, and economic inequality. Ferrell
makes fun of the 1% as James King, a Wall Street fat cat without a care in the
world. But when we first meet him he's in tears...stark butterball naked but in
tears, because he's just been found guilty of fraud and sentenced to a decade
in prison. Hard time in San Quentin, not a country club walk-in-the-park. He's
got a hot wife (Alison Brie) whose father-in-law (Craig T. Nelson) just made
him a partner at the firm. How could all this happen? Being a sheltered,
elitist idiot doesn't help.
With only 30 days to get tough for prison
life, James hires Darnell (Hart), his hard-working car washer who lives in gangbanger
territory with his wife and young daughter to help. James mistakes Darnell "acting
black” to mean he’s a thug and since Darnell really needs the money to pay for
his daughter's schooling he goes along with the stereotype. So basically this
is like 25th Hour, only with a lot
more jokes about black men pounding white guys in the butt. It's rather
stunning the number of times and the number of ways the subject comes up. At
first it's funny because Ferrell makes for such a perfect pantywaist wimp, and
Hart, who is about knee-high to a knee, is about as unbelievable a gangsta as
possible. One would have to be delusional to believe it, and Ferrell is great
at playing delusional. So we go along with it when Darnell converts James'
palatial estate into a makeshift maximum security prison, complete with Latino
guards and inmates who can rough him up at any turn. Sometimes, like in one
hilarious but overlong scene, it's Darnell playing multiple inmates shoving a
clueless James around the "yard", which is actually just a converted
tennis court.
All of this gives James the opportunity to
dress up like his idea of what a thuggish black guy looks like, which in his
case means dressing up like Lil Wayne. But he doesn't actually begin to see
beyond the stereotypes until much later on, and that's when the film hits on
something genuine that sadly isn't followed up on. There's a nice scene between
Ferrell and Hart in which James begins to express a genuine appreciation for
African-American culture, and Darnell is taken by surprise that he's actually
getting through. That a line of communication, a bridge between two such
different cultures is really possible is a notable sentiment. And then a bunch
of Nazi skinheads are thrown into the mix and the whole thing is forgotten. Get Hard lets Ferrell and Hart do what they do
best, and their fans are going to love them for it. Ferrell gets to be
comically oblivious while Hart is loud and self-deprecating. Their chemistry
together works perfectly, and hopefully they get a chance to pair up again on a
film with more going for it than jokes about rape, gays, and drinking 40s.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
