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Review: 'Get Hard' sends Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart's talent down the drain (w/video)

 
Kevin Hart, top, and Will Ferrell star in the rude, crude Get Hard.
Kevin Hart, top, and Will Ferrell star in the rude, crude Get Hard.
Published March 25, 2015

Will Ferrell's butt is the butt of most jokes in Get Hard, and not just in his signature exhibitionism. Ferrell gets that tiresome booty flash routine out of the way before the opening credits roll. Twice.

For the remainder of this willfully offensive comedy, the punchline is how desperately Ferrell's character — a 1-percenter so white he shakes an offered fist bump — wants to enable or prevent objects from entering his butt. When that gag needs a break, the attention shifts lasciviously to his mouth. Little of this is funny, and then only with a shock that doesn't last.

Kevin Hart's mouth is treated more respectfully by everyone except the screenwriters. The hardest self-promoting man in show business gets few chances to unleash his mow-'em-down style of stay-black humor, settling into the gray family-man role that was the beginning of the end for Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence.

Ferrell plays James King, a complete tool making a fortune in hedge fund management. James has a Bel Air mansion and a sexy fiancee (Alison Brie), whose father (Craig T. Nelson) is his boss. In the midst of John Mayer singing at their engagement party, the feds take away James on fraud charges. Too obvious from the start is that he didn't do it, and who did.

Meanwhile in South Central L.A., Darnell Lewis (Hart) runs a mobile detailing crew, loves his wife (Edwina Findley Dickerson) and dreams of owning a car wash to earn enough money to send his daughter (Ariana Neal) to a safer school. Too obvious from the start is that he will, if not exactly how — which turns out to be no great shakes.

With San Quentin in his future, James takes a clueless leap of logic that could inspire incisive comedy. He needs to find a black man to teach him how to survive in prison. Any black man will do, right? Wrong on so many counts, but that's the movie. Watching Get Hard makes one wonder what Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor would do with this premise. They wouldn't stoop to much of the material.

Some of this stuff is amusing. Darnell's conversion of James' mansion into a prison replica has its moments, especially a staged, strobe-lighted riot complete with angry monkey. A detour to visit Darnell's gangsta cousin (rapper T.I.) leads to silly cross-culturalism. Hart pulls off two keepers: a tour de force of prison yard stereotypes, and Darnell's bogus explanation of why he went to prison, borrowed from a famous movie. Ferrell briefly gets funnier as James gets harder.

But overall, Get Hard becomes an increasingly unpleasant comedy, wasting two very funny stars in a barrage of prison rape gags, lazy stereotypes, toilet stall indignities and insincere acceptance of people already marginalized in movies. An early contender for worst of 2015? You bet Ferrell's butt.

Contact Steve Persall at spersall@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8365. Follow @StevePersall.