As a movie about getting older and still having to cater to younger demographics, the Kevin Hart comedy “72 Hours” has a meta synergy to it.
Hart plays a successful New York ad executive named Joe whose campaign ideas have turned dated. His bosses no longer think he can connect with Gen Z. To reacquaint himself with youth culture, Joe joins a bachelor party in Miami despite the most tenuous of connections: He was accidentally copied into a group text
thread with four 20-somethings.
“72 Hours,” streaming Friday on Netflix, is — as much as Joe's vodka commercials — a highly engineered product. There isn't a scene in it that won't remind you of some other comedy, particularly “The Hangover.” But “72 Hours,” directed by Tim Story (“Ride Along,” “Barbershop”) and produced by Will Packer, at least knows this. The movie is itself a joke about Hart, now 47, trying to relate to a younger, more politically correct generation.
That makes “72 Hours” a better match of material for Hart than some of his (many) other Netflix releases. Most of the comic energy of the movie comes from Hart interacting with his younger co-stars, all but one of whom are “Saturday Night Live” cast members: Marcello Hernández, Ben Marshall and Kam Patterson. The fourth is Mason (Mason Gooding), the one getting married.
Hart tends to thrive with opposites around him, like Dwayne Johnson or Conan O'Brien — a spiritual father to the gawky, red-haired Marshall. And the combination of Hart plus the fresh-faced “SNL” new guard is a winning one. Hart has always had the good sense, despite his stature in comedy, to make himself the butt of jokes. And “72 Hours” is a lot of the bachelor party guys making fun of the old man who's suddenly paying their way through Miami.
“72 Hours,” with four credited writers, is ridiculously plotted. As if the basic premise wasn't enough, the movie tosses in a plot with a local drug dealer (the talented Michael Mando, of “Better Call Saul”) who thinks Joe is a rival. Whenever Joe sniffs some cocaine, he turns into a Cuban drug lord persona named Ricardo Montana — basically an impersonation of Al Pacino in “Scarface.”
If that sounds like a potentially dubious parody to you, “72 Hours” is kind of about that. Joe's trouble in New York stems partly from a Fanta ad he wrote that plays with a pronoun pun. In one scene, Joe mimes an Asian stereotype and is quickly mocked for it. The movie is a just-sly-enough commentary on Hart’s own comic tastes clashing with more contemporary sensibilities.
That knowingness doesn't necessarily save “72 Hours” from the kind of fill-in-the-blanks hijinks of broad comedies you'd expect: a yacht party, a jellyfish bite, a run-in with whale genitalia. But the “SNL” guys acquit themselves well. Hernández had a brief appearance in “Happy Gilmore 2,” but this is his first leading role in a movie. For the charismatic “SNL” breakout, it's a smooth transition. Marshall is even better, playing a weepy man just out of a breakup who threatens to turn the weekend into “Eat Pray Love.”
But the greatest sin of “72 Hours” is its utter waste of Teyana Taylor. She plays Joe's girlfriend in New York, and she spends much of the movie far away, waiting for her boyfriend to commit to their relationship. In any circumstance, this would be a poor use of Taylor's potency, but it's especially lamentable coming on the heels of “One Battle After Another.” The R-rated bro comedy, once a staple of the summer, has all but disappeared from theaters. Though it's reborn on Netflix in “72 Hours,” some things never change.
“72 Hours,” a Netflix release streaming Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for pervasive language, sexual material, drug use and graphic nudity. Running time: 105 minutes. Two stars out of four.
