Kevin Hart: What Now?
3 out of 5 stars
Rated R. Directed by Leslie Small, Tim Story
Starring Kevin Hart
Now playing
As a general rule, when a comedian says “You can’t make this stuff up”, or “Everything I’m telling you is real”, I assume the following story is completely made up. I understand that with comedy, everything is funnier when it actually happened, but anybody who has watched even three or four standup comedy shows grows skeptical of the statement.
Which is why, although Kevin Hart brings the laughs in his new movie Kevin Hart: What Now?, he also simultaneously sabotages some of those laughs. It’s not that a joke about a raccoon threatening him, or leaving his family to their deaths isn’t funny, exactly; it's that nobody believes it really happened. Constantly telling everyone it did takes away time from when he should be trying to find a better ending for those jokes, as both of these fell flat.
To his credit, he had a distinctive flavor in mind. A short hilarious skit featuring a poker game with Don Cheadle and Halle Berry did a pretty good job with setting up the standup portion afterwards. The standup, which had all new material (we get it, everybody goes night night, so say it with your chest), showed off Kevin’s ability to get a diverse audience to laugh. I was a bit disappointed that the first half of his show was comedy of the “I’m an asshole to people I care about” variety, but after getting over the fact that he also constantly tells us that he is an asshole, it was actually hilarious. The main problem with the show stemmed from Hart's use of gimmicks.
Although it’s not the first time a comedian has used sound effects to enhance their show, I can’t recall anyone using lights and backdrops as much as Hart. While telling a joke about taking out the trash, the wall behind him raised, revealing a large screen, panned out from a dark house, down a long driveway, and turning on lights both on screen and in the arena. A public toilet joke put an oversized toilet seat around the stool on stage. These weren't just one or two isolated incidents, either. It's as if in his quest to appear in as many movies in his thirties as possible, he fell in love with all of those qualities of movies. There was a movie portion to start it off, background music, fading lights, rehearsed camera cuts, (amateur) green-screening and even a post-credits movie sequence.
Hart is at his best when his jokes are realistic. He’s a talented guy who has a huge following, and unlike many other comedians, this following doesn’t have a racial barrier. With What Now though, the film would have benefitted from the audience seeing a more realistic Kevin Hart, without all of the “this actually happened” and the rehearsed gimmicks. If he was just going to act like it was a movie, he should've just done that, instead.
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2016.