WILL FERRELL & KEVIN HART IN GET HARD

2015 rating: *1/2

The second pseudo remake for Kevin Hart this year. THE WEDDING RINGER has an extremely similar plot to I LOVE YOU MAN and 2007’s BIG STAN had Rob Schneider hiring David Carradine to teach him to fight before being sent to prison. Also, it’s the second time Hart provides a nerdy white dude his personal service: in this case it’s Will Ferrell’s millionaire James King, who needs to GET HARD for an upcoming stint behind bars. 

The Original GET HARD

After a TRADING PLACES style juxtaposed opening credit sequence showing the haves and have-nots of society, we learn that King's even more exaggerated than how rich people are usually portrayed: shallow, greedy and extremely vapid. Which doesn’t mean Kevin Hart’s car-washing Darnell is a genius, or even halfway cool or streetwise. His wife can read him like a book and smack him like a bitch. So when the ruse begins, and King, after being sentenced to ten years for corporate fraud, hires Darnell to teach him the ropes of prison survival, the truly funny stuff is supposed to begin...

Yet when the training ensues, HARD has already plunged into so many ponderous clichés and flat jokes… wasting Kevin's frantic motormouth delivery and Will's staple naïveté… the hopeful arc, of King going from wimp to badass, really doesn’t matter. Especially after the plot veers into an attempt to find the real culprits: both characters trying desperately to seal an envelope that had nothing inside to begin with.