IT’S TIME FOR A CHEMISTRY LESSON
Night School is funny, but it should be better with its strong cast
Night School is one of those comedies where everything appears to be in the right place.
Kevin Hart plays Teddy, a highschool dropout who’s managed to convince his successful fiancée that he’s in her league, driving a sports car he can’t afford on his meagre salary as a barbecue salesman. He’s reluctantly forced to get his GED to move on up in the world, and who should become his night-school teacher but Tiffany Haddish, playing Carrie, a no-nonsense, underpaid teacher who can see through Teddy’s less noble aspirations. With this level of comedic talent and a rock-solid, relevant premise (let’s face it, social mobility is always relevant), the movie sells itself.
The trailer shows what should be a funny scene in which Haddish knocks the crap out of Hart in an MMA octagon — her character’s creative effort to get the lackadaisical student to focus. Unfortunately, the jokes and performances in this scene, like most of the movie, are a bit off.
Why is that? It boils down to ensemble chemistry. Hart and Haddish are simply too similar — too loud, brash, and high-energy — to play off of each other as well as one would hope. Hart needs a boring, monotonous straight man or some kind of contrast to
his Teddy — a financial fool with the gift of gab, a bit of a temper and undiagnosed learning disabilities, but you know, he’s deep down a good person — but the cast is too large and unwieldy for him to find a suitable match.
Night School has funny jokes and some memorable gags and riffs — the night-school students stealing the test answers, trying to escape through a roof, the Christian fried-chicken franchise Teddy works at, and most memorably, Teddy finding out dyslexia is incurable and calling it “learning herpes” — but there are too many characters to get to know here, and not enough “funny” between them all to sustain something resembling humour. Romany Malco plays a Luddite laid-off factory worker whose paranoid quips would have landed far better if a few of the less-memorable student characters had been eliminated in the writing drafts so that the screenwriters — all five of them — could tighten up his jokes.
The anal-retentive, loserish school principal Stewart (Taran Killam), whom Teddy mocked back in their high school years, hence making them enemies for life, should be the perfect match for Hart. Teddy was popular, Stewart is a nerd. Teddy didn’t need a diploma to (somewhat) succeed in life, Stewart played by the books so hard he became the principal of his own school. Yet there is little chemistry between Killam and Hart to make this work as effectively as it might.
While the humour in Night School gets a resounding C+ for its intermittent greatness, the film’s emotional core and the storyline is actually well written — for a dumb comedy, at least. Perhaps that’s what all the additional screenwriters were for. While Night School passes the grade — and it’s nice to see Haddish doing her thing, with a stylish wardrobe to boot — the film’s undeveloped potential is not the greatest use of its top talent. And that’s a shame.