I’ve always thought Kevin Hart was funny. When Colin Quinn (Saturday Night Live) used to have a show called Tough Crowd in the early 2000s, he’d have four stand-up comedians, and they’d all discuss current topics. It was hysterical listening to comedians like Greg Gerardo, Patrice O’Neal, Nick DiPaolo, and Kevin Hart. The way they riffed off each other (and often joked about Hart’s height), was a blast.
I’ve seen two of Hart’s comedy specials, and I was a lot less impressed with his stand-up. Yet his characters on the big screen always crack me up. In fact, when Central Intelligence is on TV, my wife and I always watch a chunk of it, and can’t stop laughing at him and the Rock playing off each other.
So the premise of this movie, currently on Amazon Prime, was derived from some shorts Rock did as an action hero.
Much like how Nicolas Cage played himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Hart is playing himself. He’s on one of those goofy morning TV shows where the male and female hosts are always cheery, and they make fun of the fact that Hart wants to be taken seriously as a hero in an action movie, not just play the goofy sidekick all the time. They laugh at this, and he curses them out on live TV. His career takes a hit, until one of the biggest action directors around (played by Jean Reno of The Professional) has his interest piqued. The problem is, he wants him to first go to something called “Action Hero School.” He explains to Hart that all the big named action stars went through it [side note: as crazy as that sounds, when I was working at McDonald’s in high school, they wanted me to become a manager. I found out to do that, you had to go to “Hamburger University” – which was a real thing McDonald’s had, and which is hysterical. But I digest).
Hart reluctantly agrees to go to action hero school. And just as Cage reluctantly agreed in his film Unbearable Weight, real bullets fly and danger explodes all around him. You see, the guy running the school, Ron Wilcox, is a bit of a nut. He’s played by John Travolta, who is sans toupe, completely bald, and completely off the rails (in a good way). At first, Hart (and the audience) aren’t sure if the stunts he’s doing are meant to go wrong, or if Wilcox is just bad at his job. He may run into a burning building to rescue a person (a doll that looks just like Hart), but when he comes out and is on fire, Wilcox is talking to an attractive woman (Nathalie Emmanuel) who has shown up, interested in attending the school. Another time, Wilcox is angry at Hart, and starts shooting at him. The gun is filled with blanks, but it’s still scaring Hart. And after four shots at him, a real bullet flies out and hits a paint can behind him. Wilcox laughs while apologizing (and that scene might be hard for audiences to laugh at, after what happened with Alec Baldwin).
We don’t believe the blustering Wilcox does about how he’s trained Jason Statham and Matt Damon, until Josh Hartnett shows up playing himself, espousing the virtues of the school (and we’re just waiting for him to suffer the same fate that befell Bill Murray in Zombieland).
When we see clips of the director watching “dailies” we figure Hart isn’t in too much danger, but you’re never really sure. All this meta madness is great for the first half, but by the 3rd act, you start to think they’ve kind of run this one joke into the ground.
While researching this movie, it turns out some of the segments were spliced together from a series Hart did called “Die Hart” that ran during the Covid lockdowns. I’m fine with that, as I didn’t see those, and I got to see the fun shenanigans here.
My wife and I laughed enough that we didn’t feel like we wasted an hour and a half watching it. And while it’s always funny when Hart gets that angry look on his face, it’s more fun having Travolta bust into his bedroom and tell him “Lights out!” as if they’re in a jail, or when the woman joins the school, busting in to say “No f***ing!” How can you not laugh at hearing an angry Travolta shout that?
3 stars out of 5.