Night School on Netflix: Surprisingly not funny

I think that Kevin Hart is one of the funniest people alive. His combination of intelligence mixed with a little bit of ghetto and especially his willingness to poke fun at his own physical "limitations" make him a laugh riot. Especially when he joins up with larger co-stars such as the Rock, he is just wonderful on screen and his stand-up comedy specials are some of the funniest out there.

So how is it that Night School ended up being such a dud?

src

The story behind Night School is long and drawn out intro as to how it is that Teddy Walker (Hart) ends up dropping out of high school because he has so much trouble with exams, especially math. His sister is a star in academics and is clearly the family favorite. At the start of the movie we are treated to some scenes where Hart, who is in his 40's is meant to be a high school student. They did the best they could but this doesn't look even remotely real as far as depiction of his age is concerned.

We fast forward something like 15 years and see that Teddy has done pretty well for himself despite his lack of education. He is the best salesman at a store that sells high end BBQ grills and Teddy finds out that the owner is planning on passing the business to him after he retires.

src

I can't help but feel as though his boss was chosen because he is significantly taller than Hart in real life and that is what i love about the guy. He could pull a Tom Cruise and insist that everyone in the film be around 5 foot 6 but instead he seems to go the other way and perhaps insist that his co stars need to be as tall as possible so he can throw a couple "you short!" jokes in there and they work on me every time.

It's a shame the rest of the movie is just kind of lame.

You could see from a mile away that something is going to happen to require him to return to school and of course he ends up botching his chance at being the owner / manager of the grill store and Teddy finds himself unemployed. He can get a new job that a friend is offering but he must return to school to obtain his GED.

src

His classmates are a bunch of misfits and include two of my favorite minor actors who almost always only have supporting roles, Rob Riggle and Romany Malco. Even the inclusion of these two can't take away from the fact that the situations they find themselves in are pretty dumb and extremely predictable. For one thing, a big part of the film is spent on this mission where they decide to steal the exams from their school rather than study for them and the methods and execution of this plan are beyond stupid. It really isn't even remotely funny for the most part.

src

This 30 minutes or so of the film, that you can basically just fast-forward though and not miss anything, culminates in an epic bad finale where Rob Riggle gets vomited on by someone on the roof. They pan away from the scene so quickly that it almost appears as though the film-makers were aware of how bad it was and wanted to show it as little as possible but didn't have any other material.

In the end Teddy of course ends up getting his GED, you could see that coming as basically everything that happens in this film is telegraphed well before it happens. The jokes, despite the talented people that are telling them, just fall flat and the scene where this group of adults infiltrates the actual school prom that is going on is just a cringe circus.

Sadly, those are the best moments in the movie as you would expect from a trailer. I laughed very little during this movie and will admit that after just about 20 minutes I wasn't even giving it my full attention and tended to other things in my house while I just let it ride.

Should I watch it?

In case it wasn't evident from the rather scathing things I said above this movie just isn't funny and since there are no surprise moments there really isn't any reason to watch it. There are plenty of Kevin Hart films out there and I think this is one of the worse ones of the bunch, if not the absolute worst. This opinion is reflected in other popular ratings sites such as IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, where it averages around 25 out of 100%.

If you like Hart, go back and re watch one of his other films instead of this one. It simply isn't worth the time.