Hipster racism, gay panic, and a little sexism, too. The Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart movie proves that what’s really gotten hard is edgy comedy.
Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell in Get Hard
Warner Bros.
The new comedy Get Hard basically revolves around three extended jokes. The first is racist: Hedge fund manager James King (Will Ferrell) assumes that car wash business owner named Darnell Lewis (Kevin Hart) has done time, solely because the guy's black. The second is about rape, threaded through with gay panic: James has been sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin and is so certain he'll “become someone's bitch” that he hires the actually squeaky-clean Darnell to toughen him up. The third is that Get Hard is in on the other two jokes, fully aware and confident that you know that the movie knows better, drawing the racially charged jokes out with a big ol' wink — Aren't we so bad?
Get Hard is the directorial debut of Etan Cohen, a screenwriter whose past credits include Tropic Thunder and Idiocracy, and who theoretically knows his boundary-pushing R-rated comedy. But his new film is so eager to offend and pleased with its own provocations that it hardly ever gets around to undermining the racism, homophobia, and sexism it so gleefully explores.
Instead, Get Hard, which opens in theaters on Mar. 27, is a feature-length exercise in hipster racism, joshingly having Ferrell dress up in garish camo and cheetah prints for a trip to Crenshaw, and then — whoops — having the gang members he's meeting all be drawn from every half-assed racial stereotype available. It's the film equivalent of Sean Penn announcing Alejandro Iñárritu's Oscar win by asking, “Who gave this son of a bitch his green card?” and then getting mad that people didn't like the “inside humor” with his pal.
But Get Hard isn't even worth getting mad about, because the most damning thing about the movie is that it's never anywhere near as edgy as it believes itself to be, its observations about race and class both on the nose and underwritten.
Warner Bros.
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