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James (Will Ferrell) is rich. How rich? Well, when James’
fiancée tells him she thinks they should get a bigger house, her voice echoes
down the corridors of their enormous mansion replete with arches and balconies
and fountains and servants busy making it all sparkle. That’s how rich.
In “Get Hard”, James wants for nothing. He is a day trader
who spins gold from straw. If he wanted to, he could swim in his money a la
Scrooge McDuck.
That is, until the feds show up and charge him with fraud.
James promises he didn’t do it, and he is sure his team of lawyers will get him
off. But he is wrong. Then he thinks at least he will be safe in a
minimum-security, white-collar resort prison. Wrong again. The judge decides to
send a message and gives James 30 days before he has to report to San Quentin,
a maximum-security prison teeming with murderers and rapists.
James is concerned. Surely his delicate, pampered frame will
not withstand the hardships of prison. If he is going to survive, he needs to
get hard.
So he goes to Darnell (Kevin Hart), the only black guy he
knows. Actually, he doesn’t even really know him. They just ran into each other
one day in a parking garage. James thought Darnell was trying to rob him. But
cooler heads prevailed, and James promised he would have had the same reaction
if Darnell were white.
But, given that Darnell is black, James does assume that he
has been to prison and is therefore quite hard. So he offers to pay Darnell 30
grand to turn him into a bruiser. Darnell needs the money. So he agrees to
help.
The problem: Darnell is not
hard. He has never been to prison. He has never committed a crime. He knows
nothing about gangs, toughness, fighting, or surviving prison. He is an average,
middle class family man who owns a small business.
But, again, Darnell needs the money. So he plays along,
acting like he knows what he is talking about, and putting James through his
paces. James is a joke at first, big surprise. He can barely handle trash talk,
let alone faux solitary confinement or a mild beating. His case looks hopeless.
Yet, over time, in his own silly and peculiar way, James
starts to get a little a tougher, a little more savvy, and just a little bit harder.
His trash talk is weird, but effective. He still cannot take a beating, but he weirds
people out enough to keep them at bay.
All the while further details about his case are emerging.
The closer James gets to going to jail, the closer he gets to figuring out why,
and the closer he gets to being able to demonstrate his innocence. But time is
running out.
Now, I should say, before seeing “Get Hard”, I was 100% committed
to panning it. I pictured myself writing something like, “This movie is just a
gimmick,” or “Every good joke is in the trailer. So don’t waste your time,” or
“Just another goofy Will Ferrell movie exploiting his lumpy white male
lameness.”
Now after seeing the movie, I admit that I have lost some of
my resolve. Everything I was going to say is probably still true. The movie is
a gimmick. It is one-dimensional. And so much of it does trade on the deep
biological incongruence between Ferrell’s pasty body and the demands of being
hard. But this movie is also kind of funny. Ferrell and Hart are charming, and
they do have good chemistry. The jokes are extraordinarily predictable. But
they are well executed, and easy to chuckle at.
So although “Get Hard” is
a bad movie, it is a bad movie that is tough not to like just a little.
