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Get Hard (DQ)
Stars: Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Tip “T.I.” Harris, Alison Brie, Craig T Nelson, Dan Bakkedahl, Edwina Findley, Greg Germann, Ariana Neal
Director: Etan Cohen
If you can get over the fact that this Ferrell/Hart comedy is ultra-rude, ultra-crude and further into your face than anyone might wish to go, you have to admit that it's also jolly, fast-moving and, for all its scatological and sexual diarrhoea in the jokes department, basically good-natured and, dare I say it, even old-fashioned.
Let's not get carried away here, though, or they might come up with a sequel. I guess that would have to be Get Harder.
Ferrell's a mite long in the tooth for the role of the billionaire whiz-kid who seems to have it all, when his fiancée's father (Nelson), also his boss, makes him a partner. He could even, like Nelson, own a Cape Verde island. 'We could be island neighbours,' burbles Ferrell. 'I could swim over and borrow a cup of gold.'
At a celebration party, however, police charge in and Ferrell is carted off to face charges of fraud and embezzlement. On trial before you can say 'Frame-up!', Ferrell funds himself sentenced to 10 years' hard.
Enter diminutive, fast-squawking carwash man Hart whom Ferrell somehow takes for an ex-con and hires to get him toughened up in preparation for prison. When Ferrell fails miserably to 'get hard', in the tradition of Michel Serrault failing to appear heterosexual in La Cage aux Folles, a desperate Hart turns to a cousin (Harris) who's a real-life gang leader.
It doesn't take brains to work out which snake in the grass is behind Ferrell's impending incarceration, and indeed brains can be left behind in the foyer for any part of the 'fun' that follows. Ferrell does raise the occasional laugh, but Hart is just ordinary in a role that any stand-up comic could have played with similar lack of distinction. The girls are, well, decorative but disposable.
David Quinlan
USA/Canada 2014. UK Distributor: Warner Brothers. Colour by fotokem.
100 minutes. Not widescreen. UK certificate: 15.
Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 1, Violence/Horror 1, Drugs 1, Swearing 3.
Review date: 25 Mar 2015