In Me Time, Kevin Hart’s self-care feels more like audience abuse
While Hart and Mark Wahlberg have decent chemistry, what they need is a decent script
Film Reviews Kevin Hart
As Netflix buddy comedies with Kevin Hart go, Me Time is a definite step up from The Man From Toronto, but it’s not exactly a basement-to-penthouse trajectory. It’s more like metaphorically climbing out of the basement into a lobby with multiple elevators, not knowing which one to take, and thus remaining on the ground floor, confused. Mark Wahlberg is a much better straight man for Hart than Woody Harrelson, but it might help if the writers knew what to do with that pairing. Wahlberg, who’s great at playing dazed or clueless, possesses the exact sort of deadpan to trigger Hart’s overanxious freaking out. (He also looks tall next to Hart, which may be a bonus.) But all too often, they’re stuck making fertilizer when they should be spinning comedy gold from the straw of its featherweight plot.
Give a cookie to writer-director John Hamburg, who wrote all the Meet The Parents movies and directed Along Came Polly, for naming Wahlberg’s character “Huck Dembo.” That’s arguably the funniest part of a movie that begins with Hart slipping on tortoise shit—twice. Hart plays Sonny Fisher, and unlike so many Hart characters, he’s actually really great at what he does: a super-househusband, he’s at every PTA meeting, makes perfect school lunches, helps his kids build dioramas and LEGO Death Stars, and always brings the good bagels to school meetings. Sure, he feels mildly out of his depth when attending work-related dinners with his superstar architect wife Maya (Regina Hall), but she can’t keep track of which languages her kids speak, so he’s got her there.
Huck Dembo (yep, still funny) is Sonny’s childhood best friend—a notion that the IRL eight-year age gap between the actors makes super-unlikely. For years, Huck has thrown the craziest YOLO-themed birthday bashes, which Sonny eventually tapped out of because he had a family, deciding that skydiving wasn’t the best idea for a responsible husband and father. But even though Sonny absolutely loves his superdad role, everyone else somehow seems convinced he needs a break. So at Maya’s urging, he bows out of a family vacation to stay at home by himself for a while, hoping other parent-friends might join him. When that doesn’t work, he finally—inevitably—agrees to go to Huck’s latest crazy bash.
That’s a whole lot of set up, but rather than delivering a payoff, the movie keeps offering new set-ups. It’s as if there were several ideas on the table, and the studio decided to use all of them at once, serving none of them properly. A suburban dad forced to thrive at a Burning Man festival gone wrong is funny. A jealous husband goaded into excessive revenge pranks by a best friend is funny. A super-efficient friend helping his reckless buddy out of debt to a loan shark could be funny too. But without picking one of those lanes and sticking to it, Hamburg never lets any of those establishing ideas escalate to the properly insane levels that are needed.
The Hangover movies, with a similar character dynamic, always understood which parts of the story were secondary while exploring the central mystery. Me Time is all side quests; Sonny’s only goal, to return to his regularly scheduled life, is never in doubt—the family will get back from vacation eventually, no matter what hijinks he gets up to in the meantime. As for Huck, as much as he occasionally shows signs of insecurity—for not measuring up to George Clooney—he’s so resilient that there isn’t much room for real growth.
It may simply be a sign of a long development process—and if so, why isn’t this more developed?—but jokes about, say, Burning Man and the LA Weekly aren’t exactly cutting edge. (Take it from someone who used to contribute to the latter.) A gag involving a turd on someone’s bed is probably coincidentally fresh thanks to the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case—the timing doesn’t really work for it to be directly inspired—but the explanation of an “upper decker” is, of course, redundant to anyone who’s ever seen MacGruber.
It’s not just that more timely humor would do better; it’s that most comedy fans would probably rather be watching MacGruber again. Instead of sitting down for Me Time, do that, and hope that Hart and Wahlberg figure out a proper story next time that gives their chemistry somewhere to go.
21 Comments
I gotta ask, cause this written like it’s a common fact or widely understood, but what exactly was the central mystery of the Hangover movies? Where was the soon to be groom? Cause, and maybe I’m wrong here, I didn’t care about that. The Hangover movie is just odd side skits. Tiger in bathroom, Tyson punching dude, where’s my tooth, math genius; it was just a bunch of random stuff. Maybe the sequels expanded on some central theme here and I’m in the dark, but I doubt that. I can’t really separate the movies. I know I didn’t see the 3rd movie, and the 2nd one is sort of hazy. Was the 2nd one the one where Bradley Cooper was trying to steal scrips? I don’t even know.Anyway. This movie looks exactly as advertised. It looks like that goofy fun movie you start watching cause you’re home and ain’t really doin shit. And you know what? Sometimes a C rated Kevin Hart/Mark Wahlberg movie hits the spot. I’m in.
You got to see the third movie. That’s where they really bring it all home.
Based on my fuzzy recollection of the first movie, I think the “mystery” is what the main characters did the night before. And is one of them missing? Anyway, it unfolds in flashbacks and has clues.
Every once in a while, I read a comment about a certain kind of mediocre movie, the type you start watching simply because it’s on and it’s comfortingly bland. Sometimes there’s mention of needing “background noise” for doing other stuff. I know this is all very common, but I’m always struck by how far away this notion is from anything I find appealing or familiar. I do not relate to this whole idea at all, and in fact, I actually kind of hate it.
Cool story.
After the awesome “True Story”. I’m finding it hard to go back to Kevin Hart the unfunny slapstick comedian.
I was shocked by how much I enjoyed that. He was excellent in it.
Kevin Hart has one of the absolute worst (yet highly successful) film careers I can think of. Wahlberg has been in some stinkers, sure, but a couple of very good films too. Has Hart *ever* been the lead in a good movie, or even a decent one?
Do the Jumanji movies count?
His movie-length Danny Glover impersonation in Jumanji 3 is easily his greatest performance.
Wahlberg straight peaked right off the bat. Boogie Nights, Fear, Basketball Diaries. Even The Big Hit was a pretty fun movie. He’s been on cruise control ever since.
Loved him in Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees. Also, the TED movies. But, you’re right, unless he gets a good director and a fantastic script sometime soon, he is becoming an afterthought.
I [Heart] Huckabees is a pretty inspired performance, if you ask me (which you didn’t), and comes in the middle of his career (so far).
I thought The Other Guys was great, and he was great in it.
I know they’ve been in like 700 movies together, but I feel like this would have been much better if Hart’s costar here had been The Rock.
You know, I saw the trailer where Kevin Hart is doing his usual schtick, then is flummoxed while standing in front of a whackily naked Mark Wahlberg, and then violently hurls a mountain-lion cub, and I was sure this was a winner.
Jesus Christ. This looks fucking awful. Every comedic beat in the trailer is something we’ve seen before and unlike Seth Rogen, Channing Tatum, Ryan Reynolds or Jonah Hill (to name a few), Hart and Wahlberg are not screen presences I want to spend any time with. I can’t imagine ever watching this, even in month 29 of a Monkey Pox lockdown.
I was visiting my mom over the weekend and she insisted on watching this (she loves Kevin Hart, while I rarely find him funny). Good lord is this movie a horrifically unfunny turd. And it’s just weird structurally, since so much of it is the most milquetoast “family sitcom on ABC” kind of fluff, but then with some occasionally raunchy stuff just awkwardly forced in there to make this R-rated. Even my mom ended up hating it, heh.
A character with a stupid name is “arguably the funniest part of [the] movie” – the movie being a comedy and it still scores a C?
I feel like “architect” and “advertising executive” should be forbidden from being used by screenwriters as professions for their characters.