By Alexia Evripidou
Get Hard offers an interesting storyline of wrongly convicted investment banker James King (Will Ferrell), who is found guilty of fraud and sentenced to San Quentin, a notoriously dangerous prison. This movie boasts a premise with tons of potential, but as entertaining as it is, it weakly delivers.
In the hope to ‘get hard’ and prepare for his ten-year sentence, King turns to businessman and car wash owner Darnell Lewis (Kevin Hart) to prepare him for the realities of prison. The suggested logic behind this request stems from King’s assumption that because Lewis is black he must have been to prison, which he hasn’t. However, Lewis is in need of $30,000 to help his family stay in the nice area they live in so an agreement is struck and Lewis researches prison life, ultimately adopting a ‘gangsta’ persona to train an unsuspecting King on how to survive prison. His methods are unorthodox yet entertaining in many parts, when not cringeworthy cheap gags showing up King’s borderline racist ‘naivety’.
The men have a month to prepare before King’s sentence begins. And Lewis struggles to toughen up King, turning to drastic measures to extrapolate the inner hard man in him. As their adventures and bromance unfold using gay, race and prison rape humour, the film arguably only just manages to just stay within the boundaries of ‘only mildly offensive’. Some viewers and critics argue that it has a heavily homophobic narrative. However, there are many moments of genuine inspired comedy which unfortunately compete with other many moments of a dated 1970s/80s gangster comedy.
The film opens with the familiar voice of Ferrell crying like an over grown child. Cut to a close up of comical Ferrell howling hysterically and I find myself laughing against my better judgment. Jump back a month and the film starts the 30 day countdown of events that lead to Ferrell’s character shedding the tears. And begins like no film ever should, quite amusingly with a naked Ferrell and his bottom squashed against a glass window.
King, who lives in a mansion with his fiancée, his boss’ daughter, wakes from slumber with his beautiful fiancée on one side of the bed and a book called money on the other. He walks over to his large window and performs swats and stretches wearing nothing in the face of his unimpressed gardener who finds himself a little too close to Ferrell’s ‘Crown Jewels’, despite the separating glass. And so the scene is set for a typical Ferell comedy, laden with the formulaic caricature humour which made him famous in the first place. As a rule of thumb, I am not a huge fan of Ferrell, however, and I say this through gritted teeth, I laughed loudly several times during the first half of the film.
There are some great moments between the two comedians as the ridiculous training programme designed to toughen up the soft King commences. Lewis enlists the help of King’s willing house staff to turn King’s home into a fake prison in preparation. He is taught fighting, prison talk and making weapons out of toothbrushes. King comes out with some of the most inventive and disturbingly funny prison put downs I have ever heard, kudos to the writer here.
A funny scene pursues when King tries his newly learnt prison skills out on three random body builder types in the park. Half willingly offering lines like ‘I want to fight you’ and ‘you chose a bad day to go to the park’. The results are both disastrous and highly entertaining, forcing Lewis to pull out the big guns. He reluctantly takes King to a gay bar to learn how to give men oral pleasure as a last resort. This is King’s turning point and unfortunately not much longer after, the film’s too.
The comedy is raunchy and there are many jokes that keep coming back to prison rape, which can only be referred to a couple of times before it becomes uncomfortable for today’s audience. The same applies to the racist jokes; it’s the kind of humour that was used mainly during the 1970s and 80s and feels out of context in today’s world, which is a pity, as I expected more from Tropic Thunder’s co-screenwriter and director here Etan Cohen. Taboo humour is difficult and needs to be written and performed perfectly to get it right, otherwise it can be like watching a slow train crash.
The film narrowly escaped the crash however. In spite of this, the film offers many belly laughs and I was actively entertained for the most part.
DIRECTED BY Etan Cohen
STARRING Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart
US 2015 100mins
