The “Don’t Watch This” File: “Get Hard”.
Etan Cohen’s “Get Hard” has one joke at its disposal, and it milks this joke for practically all it’s worth. What’s the joke, you ask? Prison rape. Yup. We laughing yet?
George Carlin once said in a standup bit that you can make anything funny — it’s in the tone, timbre and delivery of the joke that we can be brought to laughter; it’s not always the subject matter itself. Because it’s not enough to present your audience with shocking subject matter the way that someone like, say, Seth MacFarlane does — without anything to say about what you’re mocking, you’re operating on the level of a schoolyard bully. I wonder what Carlin would have to say about “Get Hard,” which is 100 skin-crawling minutes spent in a comic vacuum, all devoted to one clueless white dude’s unfounded fear of being sexually assaulted by domineering alpha male inmates. It would have taken a comic mind of Carlin’s magnitude to somehow make this material incisive, let alone amusing, and on the basis of “Get Hard,” co-writer and director Etan Coen is no George Carlin.
The opening scenes promise a different kind of movie: one with more of an edge and an awareness of itself, perhaps a “Bulworth” for the Gary Sanchez set. Will Ferrell plays James King, another one of the actor’s deluded, entitled boobs, a man who is drunk off his own sense of self-worth and seemingly oblivious to the world at large. James lives in the 1% bubble of Bel Air, one of Los Angeles’s wealthiest and most insular neighborhoods. He has a voluptuous bombshell of a wife (Alison Brie) who bears the brunt of some truly awful shit at the hands of the three credited screenwriters (Coen plus “Key and Peele” writers Jay Martel and Ian Roberts), and to cap it all off, he’s about to be made partner at her father’s hedge fund firm. Just how contemptuously unaware is James of his surroundings? In the morning, he stretches in the nude in front of his gardeners, all while chatting casually to them in Spanish. If you don’t find this bit particularly funny, it doesn’t matter: the filmmakers cut back to it again and again, as if they can’t believe how amusing the sight of the doughy Ferrell parading his junk in front of a bunch of unsmiling Hispanic laborers is.
The early scenes juxtapose James’ toney, high-end existence with that of Kevin Hart’s Darnell. Darnell’s the manager of a car wash whose only real palpable attributes are that he’s hard-working and honest. He’s also dedicated to sending his young daughter to a better school than the one she currently attends, located in turbulent, gang-ridden South Central L.A. This last bit of information is what compels Darnell to milk James for a bit of cash once the rich white man — who, in the movie’s one sly joke, believes that it’s he who is in fact marginalized and misunderstood— finds out he’s going to a maximum-security prison for ten years. Suffice to say, Darnell is no street dude, and the diminutive Hart is about as intimidating as Mickey Mouse. But that doesn’t stop the pint-sized blue collar man from indoctrinating James into a sort of hare-brained training regiment intended to prepare him for the harsh realities of prison life.
And so the rape jokes begin. So, so many rape jokes. I guess the reasoning was that what “Old School” did for streaking was what “Get Hard” would do for the cornhole gag. I guess if you’re fourteen and the thought of anal violation is inherently hilarious, it works. At every opportunity, Darnell reminds James that he is the prime target for assailants in the big house: that he’ll be “turned out” and used as a “bitch” for the entirety of his ten-year stint. At one point, Hart even mimes the sounds of James getting raped by clapping his palms together rapidly and it’s somehow more horrifying then witnessing the act itself. I’m all for pushing the envelope, but is anything about this material intrinsically funny? Even if it isn’t, are the filmmakers doing anything to elevate it beyond a cheap, smutty temporary gag? I suppose some of the casually homophobic young men in the film’s core audience might enjoy it, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth.
The metaphor at play in Coen’s movie is fairly obvious: James has been raping middle-class America vis a vis his naked greed and unchecked white-male privilege for years, and now that his luck has finally caught up to him, he’s about to get a taste of his own medicine. And sure enough, the movie’s brisk opening scenes promise a movie with more bite, or at least some minute degree of satirical insight. When James’s father, played by Craig T. Nelson in a grotesque, Trumpian caricature, tearily laments that he started his company with little more than his “two own hands, a computer and an eight million dollar loan from my father,” it’s got more genuine wit and anger than anything else in the rest of this flaccid movie (the line smacks of Adam McKay, Ferrell’s partner and a producer here, who presumably had a hand in shaping the script) . With more elevated comic ambitions, “Get Hard” might have been a relevant, outraged comedy that dissected 21st-century notions of racial identity (lofty notion but hey, a guy can speculate, right?). But no: Coen’s point of view is strictly below the belt, which is never more apparent then in an icky scene where Darnell implores James to head into a bathroom at a mostly-gay café in West Hollywood and perform fellatio on a stranger. “When life gives you lemons,” Darnell deadpans “you make Dick-ade.”
“Dick-ade doesn’t sound like a significant improvement over dick,” is the reply Darnell gets. And so, “Get Hard” is far from an improvement over some of the lesser works Ferrell’s done in recent years — if anything, it ranks as one of his worst movies. It’s an oddly sour, hateful enterprise that foregoes real insight into the racial and social boundaries that separate James and Darnell for a never-ending litany of rape gags, dick gags, cheap race-baiting, thankless cameos from the likes of T.I. and Matt Walsh, witless attempts at improv and some good-old-fashioned misogyny for good measure. Alison Brie is a marvelous comic actress, but her character here is a monstrous hate letter to the female race: bereft of redeeming qualities and human warmth, she exists as little more than a harpy shrew armed with a thousand yard stare and a heart of ice, one whom the filmmakers gleefully unload on whenever they get a chance. Ferrell and Hart are both funny, gifted clowns: though Hart is undeniably prone to mugging, he gets points for energy and enthusiasm, and few other American actors are adept as conveying mental unrest as Ferrell is in his own damaged-soccer-dad kind of way. But “Get Hard” is limp and lazy and grating, and not the unhinged vehicle that these two fine comic performers deserve. Then again, do any of us deserve this thing?
If you liked what you’ve read, be sure to follow Nicholas Laskin for more film reviews and retrospectives, and Panel & Frame for more emerging voices in Film, Comics, Literature and Art!
