Plot: A 40-year-old executive ends up at a three-day bachelor party with twenty-somethings after being mistakenly included in their chat group.
Review: Kevin Hart may be the hardest-working man in Hollywood, but not necessarily the most talented. With an average of three film and television projects per year, crossing movies, series, and stand-up, Hart’s signature brand of humor has been ever-present on screens for over a decade. As he has hinted at in recent specials, Kevin Hart is embracing his 40s and aging, something that is starting to turn into plot elements of his fictional characters. The new Netflix movie 72 Hours uses the divide between Gen Z and Elder Millennials as fodder for stale jokes. Emulating bachelor-party comedies like The Hangover, 72 Hours combines sex, drugs, and crime lords into a rote, formulaic project that is both unfunny and painfully clichéd.
Kevin Hart plays Joe, a forty-year-old marketing executive up for a big promotion to Chief Creative Officer, when he learns that he is viewed as out of touch with the younger demographic. Told he will lose the new job unless he can deliver a winning campaign for a vodka brand, Joe decides to lean into a group text he was accidentally added to by Nick (Marcello), who is planning a bachelor party in Miami for his best friend, Mason (Mason Gooding). Telling his girlfriend Jennifer (Teyana Taylor) he is headed out with strangers to party, Joe discovers just how out of touch he may be when he meets Nick, Mason, Hunter (Ben Marshall), and Freshman (Kam Patterson). Offering to pay for a mansion, a yacht, and their alcohol in exchange for covertly studying them for marketing potential, hijinks inevitably ensue.
72 Hours leans heavily into the differences between the older Joe and his younger co-stars, but the jokes are aimed at Kevin Hart being a fish out of water. Joe struggles to keep up with the metabolism of his new twenty-something friends as much as he struggles with their more emotionally open personalities. Each of the younger guys brings their own foibles, like Hunter pining for the ex-girlfriend who cheated on him, Nick feeling like he is losing Mason as a friend, and Freshman being something of an idiot. Mix that in with conflict involving drug dealer Jaze (Michael Mando), who mistakes Joe for a rival when Joe affects a Scarface-inspired accent and personality, along with a cop (Mike Epps) trailing them, and chaos ensues. Even a cameo from Katt Williams feels too on the nose as 72 Hours mines the same dick jokes over and over while highlighting just how out of touch Joe is.
I won’t lie and say I didn’t laugh while watching 72 Hours, because there are a few jokes that work. Some of the roles are wasted here, especially Teyana Taylor in a glorified cameo and Andy Garcia in what could have been a great turn. The movie features three current Saturday Night Live cast members, Marcello Hernandez, Kam Patterson, and Ben Marshall, who either speak to the producers’ reliance on cheaper talent to pad the cast or to their desire to bring on performers who could improvise and pad out the already overlong 105-minute running time. The core structure of the movie is a carbon copy of The Hangover, but without the mystery or originality. This movie follows a linear structure that progressively grows more chaotic as the subplots converge, culminating in a sentimental ending where everyone learns a lesson and Joe rediscovers who he is.
I had higher expectations based on the writing and directing behind 72 Hours. Written by Cobra Kai and Harold & Kumar creators Mitch Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg and directed by Barbershop and Fantastic Four helmer Tim Story, 72 Hours instead relies more heavily on Tim Story’s prior working experience with Kevin Hart on Ride Along and its sequel. Those movies at least had some action in them that hid some of the bigger flaws in their uneven scripts, whereas 72 Hours doesn’t even try to be original. At times, it feels like Hurwitz and Schlossberg want to mock Gen Z’s image of masculinity and other times poke fun at outdated expectations of what it means to be a man, but both fall short and rely instead on scatological humor. I am all for a funny vomit scene or an unexpected bit of nudity, but this movie is structured and reliant on Kevin Hart’s signature schtick that it cannot get out of its own way.
72 Hours is too long and too familiar to warrant a watch, even if you are intrigued by Kevin Hart and the ensemble cast. Yeah, you will probably chuckle a few times, but the movie just plods along without doing anything new. The actors all get moments to shine, and the movie may have worked better without Kevin Hart and instead focused on the quarter of young guys going on their own Hangover-esque misadventure, but even that has been done before, time and again. 72 Hours does not have anything to say about youth or aging that we have not already seen, and it pales compared to other bachelor party movies. If you are a Kevin Hart aficionado, you will be okay with this movie as yet another take on every other movie he has made over the years.
72 Hours is now streaming on Netflix.
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