By Jeremy Smith
GET HARD is a gleefully vulgar comedy about a wealthy white businessman who recruits an honest, hardworking black man to prepare him for a ten-year sentence in San Quentin State Prison. There is rich satiric potential in this premise, but aside from a few sly swipes at America's new plutocracy, and, most piercingly, white cultural appropriation of hip-hop (I'm guessing Iggy Azalea's management didn't bother to ask how "Fancy" would be used in the movie), the film is content to be a dim, riff-laden showcase for Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart. Fortunately, Ferrell and Hart are two naturally funny performers who seem delighted by the opportunity to push each other into some outrageously absurd situations. They're great together, which means that, for 100 minutes or so, you're laughing more than thinking about doing your taxes. But the film strives to be provocative at times, and that's a problem for a trifle of this nature; scenarios clearly envisioned as "edgy" occasionally play as mean-spirited, with stereotypes being indulged when smarter filmmakers would explode them.
And that's the primary frustration with GET HARD: producer and co-screenwriter Adam McKay is one of those smarter filmmakers. Movies like ANCHORMAN, TALLADEGA NIGHTS and STEP BROTHERS are loaded with potentially offensive gags, but the laughs are generally derived by the aloofness of the characters; Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby and Brennan Huff do not perceive the world as normal people do, so pretty much anything they do can be written off as ignorant. But GET HARD wants to have some real-world resonance; there's a scene early in the film where Darnell (Hart) drops his young daughter off at her heavily barricaded elementary school, and she waves goodbye to him as she's wanded by security. It's hardly the first time public schools have been portrayed as prison prep, but the age range of the students here gives the sequence a charge. Given that Darnell has thus far been portrayed as a decent man with dreams of opening his own car washing business, there's an immediate and tangible rooting interest in his goal to make a better life for his family. There's nothing remotely this human in McKay's other Ferrell comedies.
While GET HARD isn't officially a McKay film (Etan Cohen directed), his political sensibilities are all over the film - particularly his outrage at under-punished white-collar crime. The movie toys with notions of extreme entitlement and insensitivity (Ferrell's James thinks nothing of stretching nude in front of his Hispanic groundskeepers), but they're never seriously developed. The sharpest idea in the film is math-whiz James hiring Darnell based solely on the high statistical probability that he, as a black man, has been incarcerated at least once in his life (he hasn't). But by the time James is banging with Darnell's gangster cousin (T.I.) in Crenshaw, the jokes have devolved to the sight of Ferrell guzzling King Cobra malt liquor and falling for a squeaky-voiced woman with an ample booty (there's a well-known term for this kind of female, but I am not at liberty to use it). The sociopolitical commentary never goes deeper than the gang members showing respect for the wanton criminality of Wall Street bigwigs. These 1% motherfuckers are truly ruthless.
For the most part, GET HARD is perfectly acceptable as a broad goof in which Darnell turns James's house into a pretend penitentiary - thus allowing his mistreated maids and landscapers the opportunity to treat him like dirt for a change. There's a solid running gag about "keistering" (i.e. the stowing away of shivs in one's anal cavity), and a great scene where Darnell hectors James on the yard playing, alternately, black, Hispanic and gay inmates. It's rough, R-rated stuff with no shortage of prison rape jokes, but they never feel truly insensitive because they're played as broadly as every other prison rape joke you've ever seen (and, let's face it, we've been inundated with prison rape jokes for decades).
There is, however, a horribly misconceived set piece midway through the film that takes place at, according to Darnell, Los Angeles's "flirtiest" gay brunch. The happy idea here is that James needs to grow accustomed to sucking dick because he'll be doing lots of it in prison for survival's sake - and where better to conquer his dick-sucking phobia than the city's prime homosexual hook-up spot? So James gets with a random, flamboyantly gay fellow (the way-too-good-for-this-nonsense Matt Walsh), and proceeds to administer a toilet-stall blow job with all the disgust of an eight-year-old eating his veggies. It's all predicated on gay panic, replete with a jarringly brief insert of a scary gay penis (which elicited shrieks of horror at my screening, as intended). The filmmakers attempt to redeem the characters' silly homophobia by having Darnell strike up a friendship with a friendly, lovestruck gay man (T.J. Jagodowski, star of countless Sonic ads), but the damage is done. I have no idea how Cohen, McKay and the other writers ever thought this was a good idea; I mean, I understand that it's an easy, stupid laugh, but it's also remarkably insensitive in that it treats gay sex as something unthinkably awful - like prison rape. I know it's not their intent, but the filmmakers are basically saying gay men would fare better in prison because they don't recoil at the sight of another man's penis. Sadly, I bet the scene tested through the roof, so there's no way the studio (or, most likely, the filmmakers) ever considered cutting it.
Racially, GET HARD is an equal-opportunity offender. The most likable character in the film is Darnell's wife, Rita (Edwina Findley Dickerson), who gets the movie's biggest laugh when she slaps the shit out of him for cavalierly calling her a bitch. Not faring nearly as well is Alison Brie, whose character arc and wardrobe choices are practically identical to Kelly Curtis's in TRADING PLACES. It's an odd waste of a great comedic actress. Craig T. Nelson, meanwhile, is well cast as Ferrell's ostensibly upright father-in-law; he hasn't been this delectably evil onscreen since made the mistake of pissing off Action Jackson. But the film belongs to Ferrell and Hart, and, save for one awful scene, it works just fine as a dumb comedy. Here's hoping McKay makes the smart version of this film - or, better yet, his long-in-development Lee Atwater biopic - one day.
