Sentenced to ’72 Hours’ With Kevin Hart

Have you ever started watching something and, within moments, thought, “I hate this so much”? That was my experience with the new Kevin Hart bro comedy that recently dropped on Netflix. From the cheap-looking title card to the cornball jokes and monumentally lazy premise, 72 Hours is bad-bad.

Directed by Tim Story, the Netflix comedy surrounds Hart with Marcello Hernández, Mason Gooding, Teyana Taylor and a crowded bench of younger comics, essentially dropping one of the last decade’s biggest comedy stars into a culture that has turned Kevin Hart into that meme of him staring, holding a mic. But don’t get it twisted, in 72 Hours, Hart is nothing but a pincushion of tired jokes of being the Millennial “old guy.”

Watching 72 Hours, I kept wondering how someone at Netflix read this script and said, “Dude, this rules. Make this movie.” The jokes land like dead fish wrapped in newspaper. For Hernández and the younger cast, I understand the appeal: It’s a chance to be in a Kevin Hart movie. Unfortunately, it’s also the kind of Kevin Hart movie they may eventually agree never to speak of again.

Hernández occasionally finds a pulse, mostly because his natural charisma briefly overpowers the screenplay. But even he can’t drag the corpse of this movie back to life.

Here is the movie’s ultra-deep plot in all its arthouse splendor:

Hart plays Joe Nixon, a forty-year-old advertising executive whose bosses decide he has lost touch with young people. Apparently, this has become a fireable offense. Through a ridiculous series of events, Joe is accidentally added to a group chat for a twenty-something bachelor party in Miami. He decides to treat the weekend as field research and barges into three days of drugs, clubs, bad decisions, and yuck-yuck generational humiliation. Oh, and Joe is apparently a secret rich dude who can afford to buy these kids everything.

What Hart’s Joe also doesn’t lean into is that these kids would have been down to make content and be a part of some branding strategy research had Joe been honest, but NOPE – the banality of puking after drinking two bottles of Pepto Bismol is front and center for yet another movie churned out in the content mill. Then, because the movie apparently doesn’t trust that premise to fill two hours, it throws in a completely unnecessary crime boss connected to the group’s Airbnb mansion.

Every beat feels like a hack writers’ room pointing at Hart and yelling, “Look at the old dude!” The movie’s idea of Gen Z comedy is a string of snarky observations followed by people laughing at Joe for trying to be Cool Man Joe. There are no actual punchlines. It’s all pointing and snickering.

Even the name Joe feels unbelievably lazy. I’m surprised his last name isn’t Smith.

Sure, everyone eventually learns some kind of half-assed emotional lesson. Joe learns that being young isn’t everything. The younger guys presumably learn that old people are human beings. Maybe somebody learns the true meaning of friendship. I guess. The plot is so threadbare that my eyes started glazing over whenever the movie attempted anything resembling sincerity.

72 Hours wants to be The Hangover without the escalating lunacy and Old School without the affection – or the writing prowess. There’s even a little Porky’s in its DNA, with it’s cruder humor, which is still tepid for Gen Z, although I realize mentioning Porky’s makes me approximately the same age as Joe.

The Rotten Tomatoes score is sitting in a deserved mid-teens, and there is nothing in the production that is capable of saving it. I tried to find something positive. Hernández has his moments as the gang of friends’ leader, and the cast clearly showed up ready for their breakout beyond Saturday Night Live, but the movie gives them nothing resembling a joke to work with.

Maybe that’s the real explanation for how 72 Hours got made. Netflix didn’t need anyone to believe the script was good. It needed Kevin Hart’s face, a Miami mansion, a bachelor party and enough manufactured chaos to make somebody stop scrolling and click the thumbnail. They had to know it’s mindless schlock for the sake of “making content.”

72 Hours isn’t terrible because it is juvenile, offensive or stupid. Plenty of great comedies are all three. (Jackass, Dumb and Dumber, Step Brothers, Step Moms, Sisters) It is terrible because nobody involved appears to have believed jokes needed to be written. (Tina Fey would never.) Kevin Hart shouting, young people using slang, and a few babes in bikinis on a yacht. Don’t waste your time. There are more exciting episodes of Paw Patrol, and at least those understand pacing.