Get Hard
Director: Ethan Cohen
Starring: Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Alison Brie
100 mins; Class 15;
KRS Releasing Ltd

And the run of terrible, unfunny comedies continues with Get Hard, which, despite its double-entendre title, is a completely flaccid effort starring funny men Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart.

Ferrell stars as successful hedge fund manager James, who, days before his wedding to the beautiful but vapid Alissa, is arrested for fraud and sentenced to a stint in the notorious San Quentin prison.

Completely unprepared for this, he enlists car wash proprietor Darnell (Hart) to prepare him for life in jail – to ‘get hard’ - assuming that of course, being a black man, Darnell has spent some time behind bars.

The film’s title is a dead giveaway of the one-note gag that runs throughout the movie, a phrase that is thrown in almost every scene and it is funny exactly zero times.

You have to admire the bold political incorrectness of the premise and, had that boldness translated into a smart satire ridiculing the breathtaking racism of the plot, the film could have been great.

But it never rises above its brand of tiresome crass humour and seems to go out of its way to enforce the stereotypes it is portraying.

The script just falls into a series of one lame cliché after another

There are a few interesting moments (earning the film a second star) as Darnell decides to run with the idea and, completely incompetently, attempts to teach James how to fight, defend himself from unwanted sexual advances and possibly join a gang once in jail.

However, the script just falls into a series of one lame cliché after another, laden with shallow stereotypes with blacks (gang members), women (the young, money-grubbing fiancée, the sexy woman whose backside we see more often than her face) and gays (there seems to be a line about prison rape every five minutes) the target of every joke, which all misfire.

That Ferrell and Hart have compatible chemistry is undeniable. So too is the fact that it is completely wasted, the comic potential never quite taking off. Their disparate characters could also have been mined for some really great comedy.

Ferrell does what he can with the self-absorbed James, who lives in a befuddled haze as he tries to come to terms with his fate, while Hart’s Darnell is a ball of buzzing energy... yet nothing of substance really comes of it.