NETFLIX’S 72 Hours: In Which Kevin Hart is Trapped Between Millennial Irony and Gen Z Affect. 

A parade of millennial cringe, Gen Z shorthand and recycled bachelor-party antics, NETFLIX’S 72 Hours only occasionally finds life in the chemistry between its younger ensemble.

The foremost thing you notice, some forty minutes after the familiar Netflix tum-dum, is the patronizing specter of Todd Phillips' The Hangover trilogy haunting Tim Story's 72 Hours. A counterfeit specter, no doubt. Even if one concedes that decent studio comedies have become a scarce commodity in Hollywood's unholy assembly line of middle-brow entertainment by dint of a filial devotion to farce, the film still demands a measure of honesty. Its humor exists in a state of eternal recurrence, a Groundhog Day of exhausted comic devices, where every phallic gag and bout of toilet humour resembles a Frankenstein's monster stitched together from the most shopworn impulses of Judd Apatow's filmography. 

Tim Story's film follows Joe (Kevin Hart), a middle-aged executive who is accidentally added to a group chat for a bachelor party in Miami. Sensing an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the twenty-something colleagues whose approval he covets, he pays for an extravagant mansion and joins the festivities himself, treating the weekend as an accelerated course in the mores of America's decadent youth. The group, played by Ben Marshall, Marcello Hernández, Kam Patterson and Mason Gooding, serves as both Joe's audience and his tutors, their easy camaraderie exposing the distance between his carefully managed adulthood and the spontaneity he longs to recover. The weekend gradually slips into increasingly absurd territory, bringing the group into conflict with drug smugglers before a cocaine-induced haze leads Joe to imagine himself as the fearsome cartel boss Ricardo Montana. 

Comedy is famously difficult to execute. It's not the craft of the pendulous writer nor is it the playground of the actor too timid for scripted embarrassment and gaffes. Kevin Hart, however, for all his stand-up chops and ability to tell a joke without a punchline on the horizon, is no Adam Sandler or Eddie Murphy. He is profoundly unfunny when he makes himself the subject of humorous derision. The film keeps circling back to its central idea without ever really exploring it. Joe's determination to learn how young men think and behave in their respective milieux has enough comic potential to sustain an entire film, yet the screenplay seems more interested in finding occasions for Kevin Hart to riff. The generation gap morphs into a delivery system for familiar comic business: look-alike jokes, awkward attempts at contemporary slang, escalating intoxication and a steady flow of gags that feel imported from other studio comedies.

The film's longest comic detour comes after Joe accidentally ingests cocaine and imagines himself as a drug lord named Ricardo Montana. Hart leans into the Scarface-protoplasm rendition with an exaggerated accent that might compel a chuckle or two from a true Mafioso and a great deal of confidence, and the joke keeps returning as though dead-horse-beating repetition alone will make it funnier. The screenplay even pauses to comment on how offensive the routine is, as some meta-commentary winkfest to the woke killjoys amongst us . A later confrontation with Katt Williams carries the same quality. It gestures toward Hart's public persona and his fraught history with Williams, inviting the audience to appreciate the reference more than the scene itself. By then, 72 Hours settles into the comfortable habit of treating Kevin Hart as the punchline. Teyana Taylor’s Jennifer is a curious missed opportunity. The film barely considers what prolonged waiting might have done to her, preferring the familiar figure of the patient girlfriend suspended in a man’s arrested development. Taylor has the presence to suggest a woman with her own accumulated disappointments and desires, but 72 Hours leaves those possibilities largely unexplored.

All is not lost though. The younger cast, filled mostly with SNL regulars (The Chuck Lorre factory is alive and well), ends up carrying much of the film's major appeal. Ben Marshall, Marcello Hernández, Kam Patterson and Mason Gooding have an easy chemistry that bestows their scenes a relaxed, lived-in quality. They move through the film with the kind of casual confidence that makes even ordinary conversations enjoyable to watch. For a while, 72 Hours seems genuinely interested in the dynamics of this group, their friendships, their vulgar banter and the ways they bounce off one another. Those stretches have a warmth and ease that the broader comic set pieces rarely achieve, and they hint at a version of the film that trusted its characters a little more than its increasingly elaborate gags. The film never quite escapes its own limitations, leaving behind the uneasy impression that Kevin Hart has become the standard-bearer for studio comedy, a potentate of what counts as comedy, or whatever is left of it. Beneath the knee-slapping laughter lies the more dispiriting recognition that contemporary studio comedy has become a literature of belatedness, forever returning to jokes and gags that have become relics of a time when we were of lesser minds. 

Black Film Wire Score: 2.5/5