Who among us has not at some point nodded sagely along when Stevie Nicks poignantly rasps “Now I’m getting older too” on the Fleetwood Mac song “Landslide?” The condition is unavoidable. Even the sparkplug comedic performer Kevin Hart, whose breakneck energy implies a kind of eternal youth, isn’t immune to the slings and arrows of middle-age aches and pains. In the new picture “72 Hours,” directed by Hart’s frequent collaborator Tim Story, the actor plays a younger man. While Hart is 47, Joe Nixon, the ad exec he portrays, is only 40. But Joe is nevertheless approaching obsolescence at his place of employment, in part because his new campaign to sell vodka to the Gen-Z demographic has been deemed “cringe.”
Finding himself accidentally included in a text chain with a group of 20-something bros who are planning a weekend (hence the title) bachelor party in Miami, he bankrolls a spectacularly vulgar crash pad for them, then crashes the mansion himself. The idea is to use the weekend as a cram session on how to talk to the kids. These kids include Ben Marshall, Marcello Hernández and Kam Patterson, all “Saturday Night Live” cast members. They’re the goofy, sensitive ones. The heartthrob of the group is played by Mason Gooding, who’s really the most sensitive of them all. The gang’s adventures put them afoul of drug smugglers and, after snorting cocaine and (unadvisedly) swallowing nicotine pouches, Joe semiconsciously adopts the persona of the mega-dealer “Ricardo Montana.”
The humor is broad and crude and often genuinely funny. The younger comedians are excellent foils for Hart, who himself remains an uncanny talent. Responding to the impressive rhetoric of an opponent, Joe says, “You say it, I’m like, ‘Oh!” That line doesn’t look like anything on the page, but when Hart delivered it in the movie, it shook the packed house at an early special screening.
72 Hours
Rated R for language, themes, you name it. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
