Get Hard - D+

Rated R, 100 minutes
Wes's Grade: D+

Forgettable, dumb "Get Hard" should be sentenced for unfunny behavior

Go ahead. Get it out of the way. The title of the profane, dumb new Will Ferrell-Kevin Hart comedy "Get Hard" is a sexual double entendre which should elicit some giggles, arguably more than the film itself, which is so named to help prepare someone for prison, or the hard life. An annoying, one-joke guilty pleasure that seems to ripoff the funnier (but hardly a masterpiece) 1980 Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder comedy "Stir Crazy," much of it falls flat, and not in a soft way. The prison-bound manager (Ferrell) of a hedge fund asks a black businessman (Hart) -- who has never been to jail -- to prepare him for life behind bars. Directed and co-written by Etan Cohen, who wrote the hit comedy "Tropic Thunder," the sporadically funny but absurd and uneven new comedy "Get Hard" appeals to the lowest common denominator, which means lots of bad language and gross-out moments. It's hardly a high point for either comic actor and tends to bring out their most annoying traits, especially the shrill Hart, who still should realize the value of comedy in the quieter moments (in other words, screaming your lines doesn't make you funnier). Ferrell, who is an expert at playing these daft buffoons, is slightly better, but most of it you've seen in the movie's trailers, and also shows he's willing to do just about anything to make you laugh or cringe (in the end, he doesn't, no spoilers here); as well, it wastes two terrific actors in "Parenthood's" Craig T. Nelson and "Community's" Allison Brie, who are given very little to do. My favorite moments had Ferrell's character picking fights in the park and getting beat up, and Hart's retelling of "Boyz n the Hood," yet I still had trouble buying into its dumb, dumb one-joke premise and predictable plotting, and much of it, especially a couple of unnecessary, mean-spirited sequences involving gangs (both white and black), seems like filler. The forgettable "Get Hard," which has some reflex laughs and an inordinate amount of bad language (thanks, in large part, to Ferrell and his producing partner Adam McKay), quickly grows tiresome and should do comic prison time for unfunny behavior. Richard Pryor, in the aforementioned "Stir Crazy," tried his own version of prison toughness with his memorable phrase "that's right, we bad." "Get Hard" is bad, and not in a good way.