All Hart but few laughs from Kevin!

Night School (12A) Verdict: Witless comedy

KEVIN HART produced, co-wrote and stars in this dispiritingly clunky, witless comedy, so he takes most of the blame.

He plays Teddy Walker, an Atlanta high school drop-out who loses his job as a barbecue-grill salesman when the shop explodes following his elaborate proposal to his improbably perfect, high-flying girlfriend.

To get a job decent enough to impress her, not to mention his bullying father, he has to enrol in night classes held at the very school at which he flunked his exams years earlier.

Inevitably, the boy who loathed him most back then is now the principal.

With Tiffany Haddish playing the unorthodox night school teacher (her techniques involve a boxing ring), and a classful of stereotypes (the dimwit, the rebel, the housewife trying to better herself, the Mexican immigrant), there ensues a series of mirthless episodes that might remind those of you who remember Seventies telly, of Mind Your Language — a sitcom we’d all rather forget.

On the whole it’s desperately poor fare, which in the audience I was in, yielded precisely three half-laughs (I counted).

I confess to smiling when Teddy gets a job in an evangelical fast-food outlet called Christian Chicken, but that was about it. For all his goofy charisma, Hart, who styles himself as a kind of African-American Jerry Lewis, cannot save this feeble comedy from itself.