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MOVIE: Night School STARRING: Kevin Hart, Taran Killam, Tiffany Haddish, Rob Riggle. RATING: M

REVIEWER: Wenlei Ma

GOING into Night School, there were two sets of competing expectations.

On the one hand, the trailer did it no favours – it looked exactly like one of those dumb comedies that was going to be more cringe than funny. On the other hand, director Malcolm D Lee made Girls Trip, which was raucously fun.

Where it ended up was somewhere in the middle – an overgrown Breakfast Club but without the emotional pathos.

There were some laughs, some giggles, even an occasional cackle, but for the most part, Night School is a lesson that often feels more like punishment.

Kevin Hart plays Teddy Walker, a smooth-talking high school drop-out whose job as a barbecue salesman abruptly ends. Having never received his GED (the American equivalent of graduating high school), his new career paths are limited.

So it’s off to night school at his old stomping ground where the principal is former school foe Stewart (Taran Killam). His class is full of misfits who never got a diploma and now want one for various reasons.

Maybe it’s the fact that there are six credited writers on Night School, but everything about it is just a little bit off.

Night School exists in this weird tonal purgatory, unable to balance its energy, where it’s not the outrageous comedy that may have best suited Lee’s sensibilities if Girls Trip was anything to go by. But it’s also not effective as an inoffensive comedy because it can take it too far when it doesn’t need to.

It has some set pieces that start off promising but they always go on for too long – as does the movie as a whole.