Review: Get Hard
Comedies are under no obligation to be anything other than funny. The best and the boldest go for something deeper. Look how the comedies from the first half of the 20th century spoke to the way we live, the advancement of technology, the divide between the races and classes. Any Chaplin or Keaton silent, Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story, Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey, Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, or George Stevens' The More the Merrier (which mined romance and laughs from the WW2 housing shortage), to name but a few, delivered the laughs, the majority of which were rooted in their social / economic / political commentary.
So, too, did Eighties comedies like Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills (itself a remake of the 1932 Jean Renoir film, Boudu Saved from Drowning) and John Landis' Trading Places, both of which cover much the same ground as Get Hard. Yet all of the aforementioned films are far fresher, funnier, and sharper than anything Get Hard has to offer. What all those films also shared was a generosity of spirit for even the most caricaturish of its characters, an affection that prevented malice or mean-spiritedness from ever seeping in. No such warmheartedness exists in Get Hard, which pairs two of the funniest men working today and saddles them with a script that revels in reaching for the lowest hanging comic fruit.
Wealthy hedge-fund manager James King (Ferrell) has it all - the Bel Air mansion, the gorgeous but spoiled wife-to-be (Alison Brie), and a partnership in the firm owned by his future father-in-law (Craig T. Nelson). When James is arrested on multiple counts of fraud and embezzlement, he turns to the only black man he knows to get him ready for prison life. That man would be Darnell Lewis (Hart), a hardworking family man looking to raise $30,000 to start his own car wash.
The premise is promising: here is a white guy who automatically assumes the worst of a black man, and a black man pretending to be a thug so he can afford to place his daughter in a school that doesn't require her to pass through metal detectors. James preaches hard work instead of handouts, but it is Darnell that actually puts that into practice. There are so many ways this could unfold - Darnell enlists James' beleaguered Latino household staff to turn the mansion into a simulation of San Quentin; Get Hard could have gone further with this idea of a clueless white man cooperating in his own comeuppance - but instead it travels the path most taken: male rape. Specifically, the rape of a white man by either a black or Latino man.
It is easy to get a chuckle or two out of and even overlook this ought-to-be-retired trope, but to have it drawn out for an entire movie? The screenwriters - Jay Martel, Ian Roberts, and director Etan Cohen - certainly strain to try and when the film's most outrageous scene arrives, it becomes evident that Get Hard is but a series of stepping stones leading to the sight of Will Ferrell on his knees in a toilet stall, gearing up to take a penis in his mouth, and being slapped by it in the end. Get Hard never quite recovers from this objectionable level of crudeness, and most of the scenes that follow - Darnell introducing James to his gangleader cousin Russell (Tip "T.I." Harris) and his crew, Darnell and James fleeing a bar of white supremacists - seem sloppily designed to distract from it.
Ferrell and Hart carom very well off one another, and their ample talents guarantee some laughs. Yet not even their boundless energy and undeniable commitment to getting the laugh can save Get Hard from becoming a tiresome slog.
Get Hard
Directed by: Etan Cohen
Written by: Jay Martel, Ian Roberts, Etan Cohen
Starring: Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Alison Brie, Craig T. Nelson, Tip "T.I." Harris, Greg Germann, Edwina Findley Dickerson, Ariana Neal, Erick Chavarria, John Mayer
