Get Hard

Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart team up in this culture-clash buddy comedy. Ferrell plays a wealthy financier sentenced to prison for fraud. He seeks Hart’s help to prepare him for prison, only Hart’s character has never actually been incarcerated.

So a rich clueless white person meets a struggling but sassy black person and boom we have a film. It’s hilarious because they are different. See we’re supposed to think the black guy is a criminal but he isn’t! Edgy stuff!

Perhaps this is a bit harsh, not everything has to be ‘edgy’. However, when you are trying to reverse tropes and make jokes about people’s prejudices, it’s important to be ‘funny’. This is not a foreign concept to Ferrell and Hart, both actors have a hilarious back catalogue but sadly Get Hard is no Anchorman.

The film has the sense of humour of a thirteen year old boy, with the majority of punchlines being “bum sex is funny”.

This sort of irreverence can be entertaining (see the recent Jump Street reboot) but here it’s tiresome and repetitive. Coen is trying to make us think this has come from a ‘warped’ comedic mind, when actually it feels more like it’s the product of a board meeting trying to drum up ‘offensive’ jokes that won’t hurt box office takings.

The biggest crime, as with all films of this genre, is that it bores the audience. Within five minutes we know where the film is going, so unless something good happens it’s already a write-off. Nothing good happens.

Get Hard is another bland, hackneyed effort from Hollywood; a waste of time and talent.