The tagline for Tim Story‘s new Netflix movie 72 Hours is “The night is young. He isn’t.” This sets up an interesting premise, where a 40-year-old man (Kevin Hart is actually 47) finds himself along for the ride on a bucks party with guys 15 years younger than him (or 22, if you use Hart’s real age). The other promotional materials certainly make it look like these younger men and their insatiable appetite for hedonism have run Hart ragged and left him coming to grips with the fact that he’s no longer a spring chicken. That might have been a pretty funny and potentially astute movie.

But 72 Hours is not that movie. Because this is a Kevin Hart movie, it’s Hart’s shenanigans that run the twentysomethings ragged. Because this is a Kevin Hart movie, there’s one goofy set piece after another where Hart repeatedly ruins the bucks party, which is exactly what they were worried about after his cruel acceptance of their casual invite to attend. (He ended up on the wrong group chat somehow. We won’t try to figure out how that actually happened. The movie certainly doesn’t.) Because this is a Kevin Hart movie, it includes multiple scenes in which Hart’s character has snorted too much cocaine and starts doing the accent of a Latino drug kingpin. And even though multiple characters give him shit for this culturally insensitive impersonation, it’s the movie itself that has decided to include it.

Hart’s Joe Nixon is an ad man whose most recent pitch has fallen flat. His bosses let him know they might be going in a different direction for the promotion he’s been trying to get. You see, it’s clear to them that Joe no longer has his finger on the pulse of youth culture, and they want to go with someone who does. This is not welcome news for Joe’s girlfriend, Jennifer (Teyana Taylor), who has been looking forward to the financial stability that will allow them to commit to marriage and start planning a family. Instead, Joe tells her he’s going to Miami to crash a bachelor party.

See, Joe found himself in a group text with groom-to-be Mason (Mason Gooding), which includes best man Nick (Marcello Hernandez) and groomsmen Freshman (Kam Patterson) and Hunter (Ben Marshall). Bemused at their raunchy GIFs and general enthusiasm, Joe sends them $200 so the first drinks will be on him. They then begin barracking for him to come, which they might not have meant seriously. But Joe agrees, on the condition that he’ll upgrade their digs – and secretly, that he’ll pick their brains to improve his pitch for a high-end vodka that might win him that promotion.

The younger four are surprised to see Joe actually show up, though he did spring for a fancy party house, so that might have been a good tip-off. Nick lets Joe know that he considers this his last hurrah with Mason before Mason’s future wife has him under lock and key, and anything Joe does to mess that up won’t be appreciated. Of course, this means Joe proceeds to mess things up every hour on the hour, his instincts so bad that they can hardly be confused for good intentions.

Before we get into too many of the broad details that leave 72 Hours painfully unfunny, we need to start with Teyana Taylor, breakout star of last year’s best picture winner One Battle After Another. Taylor may be in the running here for Most Thankless Role Ever for a Recent Oscar Nominee. Her presence in the cast is easily one of the movie’s most promising elements, but Taylor is limited to about three scenes of minimal impact, in which she suffers the typical disappointments of being romantically entwined with an overgrown manchild. (Or undergrown, as many be the case with Hart.) Frankly, she just looks bored, and she should.

Because who would want to be with this character Hart has given us? Though you feel for him too, because if you’ve followed Hart’s career over the last decade or so, you know that he wants to be taken more seriously as an actor – maybe follow Taylor’s path to an Oscar nomination. But the marketplace won’t support it, so he’s stuck in unimaginative drivel like this, which requires him to mug and exaggerate and projectile vomit.

An astute version of this film would have really played off the generation gap between Joe and the younger men. For a movie that purports to try to get inside the heads of young people, 72 Hours is totally incurious about actually doing that. It could have been valuable to have multiple scenes where Joe is trying to decode brain rot, or a particular meme, or even particular lingo. Instead, this clash is limited to about one or two uses of the derogatory term for an older man, “unc.” The rest is just Joe making bad decisions, and the comparatively level-headed bachelor party attendees suffering for them.

The whole narrative develops sort of the same vibe as The Hangover, in that instead of making shrewd observations about the dynamics between men in a bucks party setting, it heaps ridiculous set pieces upon one another, and eventually involves kidnappings and vengeful drug lords. I guess that was just too obvious to resist since the movie is set Miami. But Kevin Hart is rightly tired of his most obvious incarnation, and lord knows, we are too.

 

72 Hours is currently streaming on Netflix.