By Geno McGahee
GET HARD was one of those movies that got bad press right out of the gates. It was almost targeted and it didn’t look very good, but it ended up turning a buck at the box office. Will Ferrell can be very funny and can also miss the mark with some of his productions. Kevin Hart has been consistently funny in most of the things that I have seen him in. Despite the unfunny trailer, I thought that the pairing of these two might work, and after watching the film, and laughing out loud frequently, it obviously did.
James (Ferrell) is a rich businessman that is out of touch. He goes mostly on perception, including and especially with minorities and the working class. He just made partner in the company and he is marrying the boss’s beautiful daughter, Alissa (Alison Brie). Martin (Craig T. Nelson), his boss, insists that he calls him “dad” and the future is bright until the FBI barges in and arrests James.
Defiant and insistent that he’s innocent, James refuses a plea deal that would put him away for a year. He gets 10 years in prison and he’s going away to San Quentin and wants to be prepared for it. He goes to Darnell (Hart), the only black guy that he knows, and he concludes that since he’s black, he must know about prison. Darnell agrees to train him for his stint in the joint but he is lost himself and relies on what he’s seen in movies to prepare James. He also phones his criminal cousin, Russell (T.I.). Russell has no respect for Darnell, but took the money to show him the ropes.
Darnell turns James’s mansion into a prison and starts teaching him how to deal with the different personalities that he will encounter, including the black gangs, the Latino gangs, the white/Nazi gangs, and the guys that will want to befriend him for sexual reasons. The comedic timing and natural funny nature of both Ferrell and Hart work very well in these scenes.
As time passes, Darnell and James become friends. Darnell gets concerned that he is not sufficiently training him for his 10 year sentence and brings him to Russell for some real experience, leading to the birth of “Mayo,” the alter ego of James. He is now a gangbanger ready to take on the situation. At one point, he plans to kill somebody to be brought into the gang, but Darnell insists they prove his innocence instead and they start the hunt for the real thief.
GET HARD is hilarious. The pairing of Hart and Ferrell proves to be a winner with the duo working off each other very well and understanding the right approach to use. In the small role that Craig. T. Nelson had, he was very funny too, especially how he looked back at his life and how tough it was working with only 8 million dollars that his dad loaned him. The film just works incredibly well overall. There were a few jokes that didn’t land, but the ones that did had me laughing out loud.
Ferrell’s reluctant bad ass role was very funny. When he starts fights at a park with muscle-bound bullies, it’s great. At one point he flips a big guy off and the guy says “what is that?” “It’s your dick. The one you fuck your mother with.” It is a raunchy, silly, hilarious movie that has gotten trashed by a lot of critics, but it’s very good. It’s very funny and I think that in this PC world we live in, people think they should be offended by it…so they give it a bad review. I highly recommend this one. It’s very funny.
Rating: 7.5/10