When a crazy-rich hedge-fund manager James King (Will Ferrell) is convicted of fraud and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Realizing that he won’t survive for very long in prison, he uses the month in which he has to get his affairs in order and turns to black businessman Darnell (Kevin Hart) for help. What James doesn’t know is that Darnell is a law-abiding citizen who has never been to prison and he decides to use this fact in order to take advantage of James to get money for his family so they can have a better life. As Darnell begins training James, they both start to see that they may have been wrong about many things, including each other.
Just like Mortdecai, I have been avoiding this up until now due to its reputation of being bad. Surprisingly enough, it is a better film. I will say that the story isn’t that original and also a little predictable but it did keep me engaged. I also found this film a lot funnier than I expected. Most of the comedy from this film comes from offending several races, sexual orientations, and social statuses. In other words, it comes from interactions with one another and how each perceive one another. They demonstrate this through the use of stereotypes and caricatures and they take advantage of their 18A/R rating. I was also very disappointed because of this since I found the writing to be very lazy since it relied solely on what I mentioned previously. Although I get rarely offended by things, it is easy to see how one would be offended by this. I wasn’t offended but I also did not find most of it funny at all. The parts that I found funny are the moments where Will Ferrell was being almost every other character he has done before and Kevin Hart was being almost every other character he has done before. I am not proud of this but I will admit to having laughed a few times. This goes back to the lazy writing and the performances of Ferrell and Hart. They were okay and they had good chemistry but I felt that they could have tried a little harder and gave us something more. I felt the story started off slow and got decent near the end after it stopped being offensive. I wish the subplot which led to that could have been explored a lot earlier. I also liked Alison Brie as James’s girlfriend Alissa but I wish we could have seen more of her. Overall I thought this movie was okay but I was a little disappointed because it could have been more based on the comedic talents of the starts but those were wasted by the material and the direction.
Score: 5.5/10
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.
