Prison film cuffed by its own jokes
Get Hard tips into stereotypes while poking fun at those who stereotype
Get Hard isn’t quite the biting satire that its premise would imply … But it is more unabashedly eat- the- rich than some critics have given it credit for.
GET HARD Director: Etan Cohen
Starring: Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart
Running time: 100 minutes
The quintessential Will Ferrell character isn’t just clueless but arrogantly so, denying even the possibility there might be more to know than he does. No wonder he was the perfect George W. Bush impressionist.
Such a role suits everything from his voice, best when drowning out others with hurt screams and cries, to his body — looming and large but soft where it should be hard. You can’t ignore him, but he’s not exactly imposing, either.
In the trappings of Get Hard’s almost- billionaire James King, Ferrell’s persona gives the rich guy an inherent layer of satirical edge: Though he’s busted for fraud, the movie makes it clear he’s just a patsy. But his inherent innocence doesn’t let him off the hook. Clueless in his wealth, he mistreats or ignores others.
Among those is Kevin Hart’s Darnell, the owner of the car wash service in King’s parking garage.
King tries to smooth over his mistake with an, “I’d have reacted the same way if you were white,” but he still brushes off Darnell’s earnest request of $ 30,000 for a down payment on a house with the usual bootstraps speech: He didn’t get where he is with a handout ( and neither did his boss, who started his company with just a computer — and an $ 8- million loan from his father).
But once King is arrested for fraud and sentenced to 10 years in maximum- security prison — only in a farce, right? — he’s happy to pay Darnell anything to train him on how to survive inside.
Darnell hasn’t actually been to prison, but he knows enough about how rich white people perceive black people to fake his way through. Borrowing bad stereotypes and a fake backstory, he and the team of ecstatic housekeepers put King through the paces of prison life, which in this case is mostly about avoiding rape.
There is some weird dissonance in the fact the two major focal points of humour here are the most well off and the worst off, which is not helped by the fact that every prison joke is directly tied to just how much Ferrell is going to be raped if he doesn’t toughen up.
Some jokes are clever; there’s a scene of Hart portraying prison stereotypes that uses his manic mannerisms well. But mostly the jokes are played out early and then driven into the ground.
This gets worse when King tries to get even “harder,” first by trying to become skilled at oral sex, then by meeting Darnell’s harder, legitimately prison- ready cousin. The oral sex scene is not actually gay panic- y — the joke is always on King ’s clueless attempts at anything less posh than trading coal futures. But then the movie tips over from making fun of people who stereotype to trading in them: There just isn’t a lot of funny here.
Get Hard isn’t quite the biting satire that its premise would imply and its stars and creators clearly want it to be. But it is more unabashedly eat- the- rich than some critics have given it credit for. And it’s funny more often than not.
Until someone more fearless comes along, it will probably be the most cutting critique of capitalist culture to make its point primarily with prison sex jokes. That ain’t a working- class hero, but it’s still something to be.