Kevin Hart’s Netflix roast seemed like the worst possible thing the comedian could inflict upon audiences this year. And yet, the superstar has just proved that theory wrong with 72 Hours, a dreadful riff on The Hangover that’s about as appealing as the giant whale penis whose semen—in perhaps the lowest point in cinema history—Hart spreads all over his face.
The lack of effort put into 72 Hours (out now, on Netflix) is almost impressive, although that’s not to say that it has no energy. Rather, the film—directed by Barbershop and Ride Along’s Tim Story—is a typically manic Hart affair that bounces between scenarios with typical dude-comedy vigor, spewing nonsense at a rat-a-tat-tat pace.
The issue is that such liveliness fails to energize material that’s wholly devoid of humorous inspiration. For proof, one need look no further than the aforementioned whale-phallus bit, which is meant to be gross-out outrageous and yet plays as merely juvenile, inane, and pitifully desperate to shock.
Before he gets intimate with that gigantic body part, Hart’s advertising executive Joe Nixon flops with a campaign for Unlimited vodka, which proves that he’s out of touch with Gen-Z. By begging his boss, Joe gets 72 hours to redeem himself and his marketing plan, during which he decides to join a group of twentysomething strangers who accidentally added him to their group chat about a Miami bachelor party.
Joe believes that these kids are his ticket to tapping into youth culture and, thus, saving his job. However, his fiancé Jennifer (Teyana Taylor, slumming it) bristles at her boyfriend running off to hang with randos, especially since he’s unwilling to grow up and commit to her.
72 Hours leans into the fact that Joe crashing these kids’ festivities is weird and creepy, with his new buddies calling him “Unc” and mocking him as a potentially predatory weirdo for renting them a luxurious waterfront mansion and plying them with booze. This is true, but not funny, nor is the fact that when they’re not ridiculing him as old, they’re making cracks about his height—the signature joke in any Hart feature, and one that pays zero dividends here.
The sole thing more frustrating than the unoriginality of these jibes is their lifelessness; it’s as if the headliner (working from a dismal script by Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, Kevin Burrows, and Matt Mider) were as tired as everyone else of these familiar insults.
The bros poking fun at Joe’s stature are celebrating the upcoming nuptials of Mason (Mason Gooding), and they include Nick (SNL breakout star Marcello Hernández), who’s none too pleased with his buddy’s maturation; Hunter (Ben Marshall, also from SNL), who’s getting over his girlfriend cheating on him; and Freshman (Kam Patterson, believe it or not, also from SNL!), who’s cheerfully dumb.
They agree to let Joe tag along because he’s paying for everything, and that contrived premise isn’t helped by banter that makes nothing of their strange dynamic. “You old, like vintage!” says Freshman to Joe, and that sums up the cleverness of the proceedings’ dialogue, which also features someone calling Hart an “angry leprechaun” and Hart announcing, after a stomach-churning night out, that he’s been “peeing out my a--.”
Joe wants to demonstrate that he’s still young and hip, but he constantly makes a fool of himself, whether he’s pregaming by chugging Pepto-Bismol and then puking everywhere, or stealing a cop’s badge and sneaking the guys aboard a fancy yacht for a gala party.
At that event, Joe runs into Jaze (Better Call Saul’s Michael Mando)—a gangster who owns the house that Joe is renting—and is forced to snort cocaine to confirm he’s not law enforcement. The drug transforms him into a thickly accented Scarface caricature known as “Ricardo Montana” that the film acknowledges as racist and yet unabashedly adores, turning him into a pivotal component of a plot that involves narcotics baddies hunting the crew.
Hart additionally affects a Chinese accent in search of cheap laughs, as well as squares off against real-life nemesis Katt Williams in a slapstick-y fight that will only be amusing to those invested in their long-running “beef”—which is to say, no one on planet Earth.
Amidst all the dreary goofiness, 72 Hours wastes energy on its characters’ uninteresting individual and interpersonal issues. Nick is mad at Mason for getting hitched, Mason is frustrated with Nick for being childish, and Nick soon grows jealous of Mason and Joe’s closeness, all as Joe learns that there’s nothing more important than love and commitment. To say these dynamics are clichéd would be stating the obvious, but the real issue is that they never lead to anything worth even a mild smile, much less a chuckle.
Hart and company hit the club where they have a cartoonish run-in with a bachelorette party and then wind up stranded on an island, which leads to their face-to-face encounter with whales’ private parts, and 72 Hours stages these and other incidents with a boisterousness that’s at odds with the comedy’s direness.
As is so often the case with his subpar films, Hart does his same old schtick, acting like a buffoonish bigshot and suffering the slings and arrows of his larger and put-together compatriots. His Saturday Night Live co-stars fare just as badly, both because they’re given nothing to work with and, also, because they’re incapable of ad-libbing their way out of their middling circumstances.
For all the controversy surrounding The Roast of Kevin Hart, that special was considerably more entertaining than 72 Hours, whose incompetence extends to squandering Mike Epps in a throwaway cameo and Teyana Taylor in a post-One Battle After Another role that’s so thankless, it’s difficult to imagine why she chose to participate in the first place.
From one-liners about Will Smith’s Academy Awards slap to the sight of Hart cluelessly swallowing Zyns and admitting to his friends, at film’s end, that he soiled his pants, it’s a disaster of epic proportions, and not saved by the late appearance of an esteemed actor who should have known better than to get mixed up in this mess.
Presumably, the Netflix algorithm will place 72 Hours front and center on many viewers’ home screens, trying to entice them to spend 105 minutes giving the comedian’s latest a shot.
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