Kevin Hart drops the ball on this one!

25 Dec, 2016 - 00:12 0 Views
Kevin Hart drops the ball on this one!

The Sunday Mail

Tinashe Kusema The Big & Small Screen —
THE problem with reviewing the few available stand-up comedy movies is that there is very little to write home about. Usually, the premises are always the same.

In the event the show is a real hit, no words can ever do justice to the jokes, punch lines and antics. The editing and camera work is hardly up to scratch, during these kind of ‘movies’, as the premise of the show is just to follow the comedian around the stage.

It is because of the above that I have always shied away from stand-up comedy until now. What can one say about Kevin Hart that has not been the title of a Richard Pryor album?

Hats off if you get the joke! A couple of months ago, I went to town over how Ster Kinekor Zimbabwe was going to screen the much anticipated Kevin Hart special/stand-up comedy movie.

Sadly, the esteemed company failed to make good on that promise and by association, I also failed on that front. My bad! But with every dark cloud, there is always a silver lining.

‘Kevin Hart: What Now?’ is a comedy spy movie/ stand-up feature film that is to be the 37-year-old’s latest special. The film features two main parts, a spy story and a comedy performance.

In the film’s spy sub-plot, set before the events of the performance, Hart is an agent for MI6 (Agent 0054) and attends a poker game event with his date Money Berry (Halle Berry), only for it to go horribly wrong.

As a result, he must deliver a stand-up comedy show, and raise a large sum of money in the process. In the performance portion, Kevin Hart performs at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia providing a “humorous look” into issues like parenting, his family, current events and his hardships of everyday life.

Largely due to the fact that Kevin Hart is Kevin Hart, the stand-up portion of the act fails to deliver due to the fact that most of the material is not new anymore.

One cannot help but get the impression he is trying to remix old jokes and present them as new. But one quality that has set apart Hart from his competition is that his jokes come from a personal place.

“I cannot make this up,” he always says in his specials. But that is his biggest weakness, after all, how much material can one squeeze from his or her personal life?

No one is that funny. The editing is always not up to scratch as some of the audience shots, usually women and men of an African persuasion with tears of laughter in their eyes, appear to have been photo-shopped into the film.

I know that is the technical term, but “edited into shots” just does not do justice to the shoddy editing.

Did I mention that, opening skit aside, it took roughly about 25 minutes before Kevin Hart produced anything remotely close to laughter from me during his stand-up segment of the film?

It was a smirk, in case anyone was wondering. The film’s only merit was the opening skit that I found funny, creative and totally the right way to start a show. Hart was Hart, engaging and demonstrating great chemistry with his co-stars.

Special mention goes to Don Cheadle and Halle “Juicy” Berry who was at her comic best as Hart’s partner and equal. She was the yin to his yang and holds her own against arguably one of the funniest people alive, which is no small feat for an actress of her pedigree.

I found it extremely impressive how Ed Helms (bartender) was one of my favourite parts of the movie, this despite the fact that he had limited lines and very little to do in the skit.

David Meunier was just perfect in role as the protagonist Victor, the Russian criminal mastermind. The guy has this aura about him that just says “bad guy” and plays the role to perfection.

Now, I have said some unsavory things about this special and how terrible is it. The film opened at $US12 million in its first week and now stands as the highest grossing special to date.

Probably what Hart needs to do now, is just go home, relax a bit and then look for better material. This lousy special might not have affected his bank account much, but another will.

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