What’s It About

A 40-year-old executive ends up at a three-day bachelor party with twenty-somethings after being mistakenly included in their chat group.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Kevin Hart plays Joe Nixon, a forty-something ad executive who seems to have his whole life locked down. He drives a Lamborghini, lives in a beautiful apartment in New York City, and dates Jennifer (Teyana Taylor), a smart doctor who is ready for him to finally propose. Joe is also about to land a huge promotion at his ad agency, until a young coworker calls his new vodka commercial “cringe.” That one word sends Joe into a full panic. He realizes he no longer understands what young people want, and if he can’t fix that fast, his career might stall out for good. Right around that same moment, Joe gets added to a group text by mistake. The chat belongs to four young men planning a bachelor party weekend in Miami: Mason (Mason Gooding), the groom, who is having quiet doubts about the wedding; Nick (Marcello Hernandez), Mason’s loud and overprotective best friend; Hunter (Ben Marshall), still hurting from a recent breakup; and Freshman (Kam Patterson), a sweet but constantly confused member of the crew. Instead of admitting he joined the chat by accident, Joe sees a chance to use these young men for research. He decides to tag along on their trip and study them so he can save his ad campaign. Here is where the movie starts fighting itself. Joe could just tell the group the truth and offer to help pay for the weekend, and honestly, most guys would probably say yes to free money and free drinks. Instead, he quietly rents them a huge beach house and hides a camera inside his necklace so he can film them without asking. This choice does not make much sense, but the whole plot needs Joe to keep lying all weekend, so logic takes a back seat early and never really comes back. To its credit, the movie stumbles onto one real good idea. These four friends have grown up together, and they actually care about talking through their feelings and building real memories instead of posting everything online. They even agree to leave their phones behind for the weekend, which wrecks Joe’s plan to film footage for his campaign. That small twist on the old “kids these days” joke is smart, and for a second it hints at a better, more thoughtful comedy hiding somewhere inside this movie. Sadly, the film drops that idea almost as fast as it brings it up, running instead toward a drug smuggling plot, an angry cartel boss played by Michael Mando, and a long stretch of vomit jokes about too much stomach medicine. The most frustrating part of “72 Hours” is how it treats its own star. More than once, Joe snorts cocaine and turns, right away, into a loud, cartoon version of Tony Montana from “Scarface,” accent and all. The movie even has one of the young men ask out loud if this bit is racist, and another character answers, flatly, that yes, it is. Admitting something is wrong does not make it funny, though, and the joke gets repeated so many times that it stops feeling like a real point and starts feeling lazy. Kevin Hart has real talent and real timing, the kind that once got him compared to a young Eddie Murphy. Watching him get handed the same tired bit again and again, instead of a script that trusts him with something sharper, is honestly kind of sad. Teyana Taylor deserves better than what she gets here, too. Jennifer is set up as a smart doctor with a big career chance of her own, but the movie never lets that choice belong to her. Her whole storyline only exists to ask whether Joe will finally grow up and commit to her. A talented actress playing a strong, driven woman should be a good sign on paper, but if that character only exists to wait around for the man to figure his life out, that is not really progress at all. The only good thing about this whole thing is Kam Patterson. His character Freshman really brings something special to each scene he’s in, and manages to get laughs from the script that doesn’t give anyone else the same opportunity. Of course, Marcello Hernandez and Ben Marshall, the guys from SNL, get to shine a bit too, but mostly they just have to give us information presented in the format of jokes. Director Tim Story, who worked with Hart before on “Ride Along,” never seems to settle on what kind of movie this is supposed to be. One minute it is a loud, gross-out party comedy, and the next it is a quiet story about marriage, friendship, and getting older. Four credited writers pile plot on top of plot here, including a strange, pointless side trip involving a sinking boat and, somehow, whale body parts, and none of it earns the emotional moments the film clearly wants to land. A movie this messy needed a much steadier hand behind the camera. So, “72 Hours” had everything going for it. There was a nice plot, a good cast of new stars, and an actor who has already had success with a comedy. And yet, they did not use any of this. They just wanted to shock the audience instead of just making them laugh. There’s a possibility that somewhere in “72 Hours” there could have been a smart movie about a person discovering that young age cannot be secretly filmed or learned. Other than a 2-minute realization dialogue, this was not the case.

OUR RATING – A HART-LESS 3