Get Hard

White-col­lar crime pre­sent­ed as gay pan­ic slap­stick is the nub of Get Hard, a lazy film that Adam McK­ay appears to have co-writ­ten and then passed over to one of his ret­inue of prank mon­keys upon real­is­ing its lack of potential.

Throw­ing com­e­dy heavy­weight Will Fer­rell into the ring with fast up-and-com­ing new­bie, Kevin Hart, the sto­ry cen­tres on the idea of the for­mer being sen­tenced to 10 years in San Quentin max­i­mum secu­ri­ty prison, and the lat­ter being recruit­ed to help him pre­pare for his incar­cer­a­tion dur­ing a 30-day parole peri­od. And by ​“pre­pare”, what is actu­al­ly meant is tak­ing mea­sures to pre­vent (or at least alle­vi­ate) inevitable gang rape. The film espous­es the notion that the best way to stop being raped is to be vio­lent and aggressive.

Ferrell’s James King is an arro­gant tycoon turned pat­sy whose capoeira, pas­tel leisure suits and gen­er­al­ly effete man­ner lead Hart’s Dar­nell – a low­ly car valet who can’t catch an even break – to con­vince him he needs a crash course in how to ​“get hard”. And not get raped. Though the film attempts to tread care­ful­ly with its racial pol­i­tics, it well and tru­ly drops the baton and then awk­ward­ly fum­bles around on the floor when it comes to ques­tions of how its char­ac­ters deal with sexuality.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the film reach­es its nadir when it attempts to fire-fight to prove that – hey! – we can mock every­one and any­one, and come up smelling of ros­es. A scene at a gay bar in which Dar­nell realis­es he may as well teach King how to suck dick (con­sid­er­ing that’s all he be doing for the next 10 years) is hate­ful and self-sat­is­fied, par­tic­u­lar­ly in its attempts to frame the homo­pho­bic Dar­nell as some kind of gay dat­ing guru.

As always with these things, there are a few chuck­les along the way. One spec­tac­u­lar scene sees Hart emu­lat­ing a three-way turf war in the prison yard by enact­ing three sep­a­rate roles. He does so with incred­i­ble ener­gy and inge­nu­ity, and it’s one of those scenes where the longer it goes on, the fun­nier it gets. Fer­rell is made to stand in the mid­dle and jab­ber inco­her­ent­ly, unable to amply respond to Hart’s light­en­ing moves. It’s a cry­ing shame that the half-assed filmic mat­ter sur­round­ing this sec­tion is so depress­ing­ly for­mu­la­ic. Seek out War­ren Beatty’s gen­uine­ly dan­ger­ous Bul­worth instead.