Team up Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart for the first time in anything and it’s got to be funny, right? You’d think. But Get Hard, with Ferrell as James King, a hedge-fund manager railroaded into prison for fraud, and Hart as Darnell Lewis, a car washer James hires to prep him for 10 years in San Quentin, commits the cardinal sin of comedy: It lets us see the sweat, the backbreaking effort of trying to breathe life into a farce based on racial and gay stereotyping. These two comic wizards huff and puff to keep the laughs airborne. But there’s no helium in this balloon. It’s one joke stretched beyond endurance. The joke being that James thinks Darnell has done time because he’s black, but Darnell is really a family man with no record. Burn.
