Movie Review: 72 Hours

Streaming platforms have become a safe haven for comedy stars from the 90's and 00's to keep collecting paychecks in a world where box office receipts for comedies have been steadily eroding since the late 2010's. When these movies drop on Netflix or Prime Video every few months, they typically log big numbers out of the gate then quickly fade away as most people view them as vastly inferior products to what these actors were doing back when their movies were playing on the big screen. Kevin Hart has become one of the leaders in this space during the 2020's. Since 2021, Hart has led a whopping four Netflix movies (Fatherhood, The Man from Toronto, Me Time, Lift)-although it does need to be noted that the former two were titles that Sony sold off while COVID was wreaking havoc on the theatrical industry. Hart and Netflix's fifth collaboration of the decade 72 Hours falls so perfectly into the mold of instantly forgettable streaming comedies that you could convince me that it was done by design.

72 Hours is aiming to be a 2026 riff on something like The Hangover or Old School. Hart plays a 40-year-old working in advertising who gets accidently added to a bachelor party group text (Marcello Hernández, Mason Gooding, Ben Marshall, Kam Patterson) and exchanges some playful texts with the group acknowledging the mistake before he carries on with his day. After a failed pitch for a big vodka campaign that he needs to land in order to get the promotion he's long been seeking, he convinces these strangers to allow him to join them on their trip to Miami with the hopes that hanging out with young people will help him figure out how to market this product to people in their age bracket and nail his second chance at the big pitch that will allow him to finally advance up the corporate ladder. Things quickly go haywire as a series of unforeseen incidents turn this celebration into a nightmare that might prevent them from leaving the Sunshine State alive. 

When Hart first broke out as an actor in the 2010's, I really liked what he was doing. No matter the size of the part or what the role called for him to do, he delivered what the movie asked of him every single time. Recently, the returns haven't been particularly strong, and 72 Hours is one of the weakest efforts he's put forth to date. This role sees him playing an affable everyman who is kind of aloof and selfish but also has a wild card streak when he starts partying. Every aspect of this character is comfortably within his wheelhouse and yet, his performance somehow manages to fall pretty flat. He struggles to make this guy who isn't a complete piece of shit but is definitely far more of an oblivious, self-absorbed dickhead than he thinks he is redeemable and doesn't quite go far enough to sell the zanier moments (it was odd to see him struggle with doing so much over-the-top accent work given how great he was at doing a Danny Glover impression in Jumanji: The Next Level). Whether this is a case of him of phoning it in or just simple miscalculation is up for debate, but it's certainly a head-scratching failure that standouts even among his recent misfires.  

The supporting cast doesn't fare much better. Hernández is pretty blah as the immature slacker best man who is afraid that his best friend is going to leave him behind for good once he gets married, Gooding makes for a pretty boring straight man as the kindhearted groom who is much more mature than his idiot friends and Marshall's awkward sad guy schtick just isn't very funny. Ironically, it's Patterson-who is easily the least seasoned actor from the main cast-who leaves the most positive impression. There's a real eagerness to his screen presence that jolts the movie to life whenever it threatens to dip below average and his comedic timing is very solid for a guy who came up doing stand-up. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Hernández and Marshall putting in a good word with Lorne Michaels after this shoot helped him land the Saturday Night Live gig last fall. 

In defense of the cast, the material they had to work with isn't great. For a movie where the comedy is primarily built around the protagonists getting into crazy situations, the chaos that each of these unforeseen calamites provide doesn't really amount to much of anything. There's no real escalation of the stakes or clear desire to stack jokes up on top of each other in order to some build momentum. Instead, the movie operates in a machine-like manner where it plows through the vulgar scenes in a coldly calculated manner in order to get to the inevitable ending where everything works out for all of the characters as quickly as possible. Part of the magic of the movies that 72 Hours hopes to emulate was a willingness to go to great lengths to sell jokes. 72 Hours almost never displays that discipline and dedication to the craft, which is kind of embarrassing since it was made by people in Tim Story, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg who have plenty of experience making movies like this. 

At the end of the day, 72 Hours served its purpose to top the Netflix movie charts for 2+ weeks and the fact that the vast majority of the people that helped make this feat possible feeling it was mediocre or bad really doesn't matter. While I'm not anti-streaming comedy by any means, it's hard to get all that excited about any of them as they're always a decent chance that they'll end up being nothing more than aggressively average time eaters where nobody involved is overly invested in the outcome. C'est la vie in the streaming ecosystem and I wouldn't be willing to wager that this state of affairs changes at any point in the near future. 

Grade: C