’72 Hours’ Review: A Bachelor Party Premise That Never Finds Its Punchline
Kevin Hart returns to Netflix with ’72 Hours,’ a comedy from director Tim Story that drops a forty something marketing executive into a three day bachelor party after he gets accidentally added to a group chat full of twenty somethings. The film reunites Hart with Story, the filmmaker behind his ‘Ride Along’ movies, and pairs him with a young ensemble that includes Marcello Hernandez, Mason Gooding, Kam Patterson and Ben Marshall. On paper it reads like a classic culture clash comedy, an older guy pretending to belong with a generation that has no patience for his outdated hustle.
The setup actually has some legs. Hart plays Joe, a vodka executive who gets passed over for a promotion because his bosses think he cannot connect with younger consumers, so he crashes this stranger’s bachelor weekend hoping to mine content and credibility out of it. There is a genuinely clever idea buried in here about a man performing relevance for people who never asked him to show up, and the film does occasionally poke at that tension in ways that land.
Unfortunately ‘Hours’ spends most of its runtime chasing bigger and louder detours instead of trusting that idea. The film keeps introducing a criminal subplot and a parade of shock gags that pull focus from the more interesting generational comedy sitting right there in front of it. Every time the movie stumbles onto something worth building on, it seems to lose interest and lunges for the next loud bit instead.
Hart is doing a version of the same fast talking, exasperated everyman he has played a dozen times before, and by now that routine has worn thin enough that it stops carrying scenes the way it once could. The younger cast fares much better. Hernandez brings a loose, lived in energy as the group’s reluctant leader, Gooding is charming as the groom who is the rare person in this circle actually thrilled about getting married, and Patterson and Marshall both find moments of specificity that Hart’s character never gets. Watching them work makes it obvious there was a sharper, funnier movie available if the script had leaned on this ensemble instead of leaning on its star.
The jokes themselves are wildly inconsistent, swinging from mildly amusing to flatly uncomfortable without much sense of control. A recurring bit involving Joe adopting exaggerated accents whenever he gets high plays less like satire and more like the movie forgot what decade it was written in, and even a character calling it out within the film cannot quite save it. There is a sleazy subplot involving a coworker’s hidden camera scheme that adds nothing but discomfort, and it typifies how the film mistakes provocation for wit.
Visually the movie is competent but forgettable, shot with the flat, functional gloss that defines so much of Netflix’s comedy output, all bright locations and no real personality behind the camera. Christopher Lennertz’s score tries to inject energy into scenes that the editing and pacing cannot sustain on their own. Nothing here is aggressively ugly, it simply never announces itself as a film with a distinct visual voice.
By the time the three days wrap up, ‘Hours’ has circled back to a tidy, expected resolution that undercuts whatever edge the premise once had. The ending plays it safe in a way that feels at odds with a film that spent so much energy trying to seem transgressive along the way. It is the kind of finale that confirms the movie was never quite sure what it wanted to say about age, relevance or friendship, even though it gestured at all three.
I walked away from ’72 Hours’ wishing someone had trusted the smarter movie hiding inside this one instead of burying it under shock gags and a star performance running on autopilot. The young cast deserved a script willing to follow their energy rather than constantly redirecting it back to familiar Hart mannerisms. It is watchable enough for a lazy night in, but it squanders a premise with real comic potential, and that makes it a disappointment rather than a disaster. My score for ’72 Hours’ lands at 5 out of 10.
How did you like '72 Hours'?
Have you streamed ’72 Hours’ yet, and did the generational culture clash work for you? Drop your own verdict in the comments below.
