If you’re looking for a hilarious, entertaining movie to watch with some of the best laughs and chemistry between the two leads, this is not the movie for you. Literally anything else would be a better choice. Me Time is a new Netflix buddy comedy starring Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg. The film follows a stay-at-home dad, Sonny, whose family goes away for the weekend. This finally gives him some “me time,” allowing him to go to his childhood friend’s chaotic birthday party. Unfortunately, this is a tough movie to sit through, as it is a comedy that fails at nearly everything a comedy should be.
After a scene that establishes the friendship between the two leads, the film shows how Sonny has settled into a comfortable married life with two kids. It’s a bad omen when one of the film’s first attempts at humor involves the protagonist slipping and falling on tortoise poop. Me Time continues, desperately trying to squeeze a laugh out of you. Fifteen minutes in, I checked the time, realized I had not laughed once, and concluded that if I weren’t reviewing the movie, I would have turned it off right there.
However, I had a job to do: I had to finish Me Time and review it. If anything, this movie can be very informative on all the ways not to write a film. There is a lot of potential for a buddy comedy starring Wahlberg and Hart. They are two talented comedic actors who have proven their worth many times before, even operating in the buddy comedy genre on several occasions. This could have been a match made in heaven, but the result never reaches its full potential. Their mild chemistry never gets fully utilized and they’re given a script where it feels like any two actors could have pulled it off.
Hart and Wahlberg are essentially playing their two comedic onscreen personas. Hart is again playing the family man who gets teamed up with a man who forces him out of his comfort zone. He has played this character in Central Intelligence and even earlier this year in another Netflix comedy called The Man From Toronto. Wahlberg is doing his energetic comedy schtick, which we’ve seen in much better films like Ted and Instant Family. They both give good performances and try to make the material work, but you’ve seen them in much funnier films. Regina Hall’s comedic talents are not used at all, as she is the two-dimensional wife character you’re so used to seeing in these films. Much like in August’s other painfully unfunny comedy, Easter Sunday, Jimmy O. Yang shows up for a scene or two and gets nothing to do.
An unfunny comedy can be very tedious. That’s a good word to describe the viewing experience, as there is nothing to enjoy in this film. There’s a scene where Sonny is attacked by a lion, which is one of the most fake-looking CGI animals in a film. This movie comes out a mere week after Beast, a movie with a much more convincing CGI lion as its antagonist. As Me Time continues with its inane attempts at humor, you may find yourself begging for mercy. This is a light-on-laughs film that you either give up on and shut off halfway through or keep watching in the hopes that it will get better. Spoiler alert: it never does.
Me Time has nothing new to say or do. The film even uses Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during its falling action, which seems directly inspired by Shrek. The writing in the final act is where the film gets even more insufferable, as Sonny verbally states his character arc. Nothing feels earned and all of the exposition is as subtle as a sledgehammer. If there’s anything this film is good at, it’s making you wish you were watching something else. You could be watching these stars in their superior movies from this year, such as Uncharted or DC League of SuperPets, or you can settle on watching Kevin Hart do CPR on a tortoise. The choice is yours.
SCORE: 3/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 3 equates to “Bad.” Due to significant issues, this film feels like a chore to take in.
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