Get Hard

When I first saw the trailer for Get Hard, I was not sure whether or not I wanted to see it. Honestly, I wasn't thrilled by the trailer and I kind of saw it as a throwaway movie that is only going to make money because Will Ferrel is in it. While I like The Other Guys, I kind of recognize that movie as an attempt to make money with Will Ferrel's name while putting another celebrity name on the title. With The Other Guys, it was Mark Wahlberg, with this movie it was Kevin Hart.

When I finally watched this film... I feel like I was wrong... but at the same time I was right.

Get Hard follows the story of James King (played by Will Ferrel), an incredibly successful stock broker. He has a huge house, he has a very successful job, and he has an incredibly smoking hot wife (played by Allison Brie)

On the other end of things, you have Darnell Lewis (played by Kevin Hart). Darnell is an incredibly hard working family man. He works at a car wash under King's business. Darnell and his family live in a pretty bad neighborhood with his wife and his daughter.

He wants to buy a house in a nicer neighborhood so that his daughter can go to a better school. Unfortunately, he just doesn't have the money to move his family. Of course, when he interacts with King, he is only given condescending remarks about how he can pull himself up from his bootstraps and he can be in the position King is in.

The beginning of this movie has some lines that people are either going to find incredibly funny or incredibly offensive. King's lines in the film are, in a certain sense of the word, racist. Now this is not the type of racism you usually think of, that racism is shown in the film, but King is definitely a different kind of racist.

Its more of a passive aggressive, subtle type of racist that a lot more people are than the stereotypical racism people think of. Here's the example, its a hyperbole in the film but when King gets his car he doesn't have his keys, Darnell goes to give him the keys, knocking on the window and King freaks out thinking that Darnell is going to rob him. The only reason? Because he's black. Whether you subscribe to the idea of microaggressions or not, this is an exaggerated version of that kind of racism.

I'll talk a little bit more about this later.

On a totally different note, lets give a quick word to Allison Brie.

Hot Holy Damn!

Like... wow... its ridiculous.

I really like Allison Brie. I really like her in Community, and I think she's a really funny actress. I am a little disappointed that she's become such a sexualized actress, even on Community, but even through my disappointment, I can look at that image above and say... DAMN!

Moving onto more constructive comments on the movie...

King is suddenly accused of embezzlement and in a surprisingly quick montage, is sentenced to ten years in maximum security prison. 

I was actually very surprised on how many days go by before King and Darnell actually come together. It seemed like the events prior to his arrest were larger than I expected but his trial was much faster than I expected. While I wasn't wild about this at first, I feel like it actually set up the characters well and got us into the action pretty fast.

And the action is the interaction between King and Darnell. Eventually, King gives a proposition to Darnell. He says that he will pay him to teach him how to survive in prison. The thing that King doesn't know is that Darnell has never been to prison. Again, King is using the stereotype of black men in prison to assume that Darnell has been in prison. The only reason Darnell doesn't call him out is that he wants the money to buy a new house. Thus, you have your story. 

King and Darnell transform King's mansion into a prison, his household workers , who he has treated horribly, are inmates and wardens of this prison and suddenly, King gets transformed almost to a point where Darnell can no longer control him. 

The training has a lot of moments that are really, really funny. There's a great scene where Darnell is teaching King about how to interact with different people in "the yard". In this scene, Hart jumps from three different characters taunting King in "the yard" and its freaking hilarious!

This movie really shows off Kevin Hart as an actor. I love his stand up but I haven't seen a lot of his film acting. I was a little worried he wasn't going to be that good but he's freaking hilarious!

Will Ferrell as well is very funny! I've kind of been disenchanted with Will Ferrell ever since Anchorman 2, mainly because I was so disappointed with the hype that built that movie up and how disappointing it was. While its probably not the best Will Ferrell movie, I thought he did a good job and he made me laugh. It gave me a little bit of hope that Will Ferrell is not cruise controlling it. On top of that, I've realized that Will Ferrell will commit to a joke no matter what. Even if the joke is not funny, Ferrell commits to it. I have to applaud him for that.  

So there's a lot of good things I've mentioned that are really good about this movie, why am I not saying its a really good movie? Well... Personally, I can't decide on whether the humor of the movie is in good taste or not. 

Now I love crude humor, I love satirical humor, I love the kind of humor that a lot of people think are pushing the line sometimes. So how is this movie different from those?

Here's the thing, I definitely think that this movie was trying to be satirical. I definitely think that the movie was trying to poke fun at a lot of stereotypes, not just about race, but of sexual orientation, religion, etc. The large part of the movie is Ferrell and Hart going to different groups and doing a bit making fun of them. By making fun of everyone, they don't isolate one group. In that sense, I feel the movie was trying to be progressive. 

Does that mean it succeeded? Well... no.

First off, the big thing that kind of bothered me was all the jokes this movie made about rape in prison. We get it, prison rape is something that has been joked about time and time again. But this movie was making a prison rape joke in almost every scene. The whole point of getting Darnell to help King survive in prison is so he doesn't get raped. 

I know a lot of people who might have a problem with making light of something so terrible that does happen to people in prison. Its not funny when it happens to women but it is when it happens to men? 

I don't know, maybe I'm in a minority here but I had a couple moments in this movie that I had a hard time laughing at prison rape jokes, especially since they kept making those jokes!

By the same coin though, a lot of the jokes making fun of stereotypes were incredibly funny. When King interacts with the gang Darnell brings him to, and almost joins them, it was so ridiculous and over the top, it was incredibly funny. And again, even when the jokes didn't land, Ferrell was committed no matter what. 

So Get Hard really ides a fine line of being a really smart raunchy comedy film and just being a distasteful comedy that in many ways is incredibly offensive. 

I don't know, I really came out of Get Hard with mixed feelings. I laughed hard, and yet I didn't really feel good about how hard I laughed. 

I suppose it all depends on how this movie will be looked at in the future. I don't think this is any ground breaking film, but are people going to look back on this and say this movie had the balls to make fun of issues that people in the United States are often too scared to talk about, or was it headed in the wrong direction by making fun of it. I personally don't quite know where I stand on that issue. What about you? 

Have you seen Get Hard? What did you think? Comment and Discuss below! Or shoot me a tweet @cmhaugen24 and follow me on Twitter to get updates on movie news and reviews!