Tim Story certainly has a diverse slate of films on his resume. He’s already crossed paths with 72 Hours star Kevin Hart in the Ride Along franchise, but Story has bounced around from Barbershop to Fantastic Four to Ride Along to Tom and Jerry to The Blackening and now this, along with sequels to several of those films. He certainly doesn’t have a niche, although I’m not really sure he has a strength either. He does seem to do his best work in films with predominantly Black casts, or at least Black leads, as most people would probably put Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and Tom and Jerry near the bottom of that filmography.
Well, there’s only so much heavy lifting Kevin Hart can do when the script never works in the first place. I know some people are calling this the Gen Alpha version of The Hangover, except The Hangover actually had a point A to point B story. A group of guys went to Vegas for a bachelor party, one of them disappeared, and the others had to retrace a night they couldn’t remember in order to find him. It’s a thin plot, admittedly, but it’s still a plot. I would argue that 72 Hours is trapped in the Netflix algorithm of, “I’m not really sure we need a plot as long as we have the cast.” And to be fair, it does have a cast.
In addition to Kevin Hart as marketing executive Will, the film surrounds him with the quartet of twenty-somethings whose bachelor party he crashes. Ben Marshall, Marcello Hernandez, Cam Patterson, and Mason Gooding make up the core group, with Gooding being the most recognizable outside of Saturday Night Live thanks to the recent Scream films and Heart Eyes. Familiar faces like Mike Epps, Zach Cherry, and Teyana Taylor also pop up. Unfortunately, I don’t think Tim Story likes Teyana Taylor very much because he gives her almost nothing to do. Nearly all of her scenes consist of phone conversations with Will as she grows increasingly frustrated with how little attention he’s paying to their relationship. I honestly felt bad for her. She just earned an Oscar nomination, yet here she ends up in a role that could have been played by virtually anybody. Hopefully now that she’s Academy Award nominee Teyana Taylor, the offers get a lot better than this.
The setup feels oddly familiar, too. Will is up for a promotion to chief content officer, but he’s told he can’t effectively pitch to a younger audience because he’s completely out of touch with their generation. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Netflix just released Ladies First a couple of months ago with an almost identical premise. Once again we’re watching a middle-aged marketing executive trying to reconnect with young people so he can save his career. This time the ridiculous catalyst is that Will accidentally gets added to a group text, receives an unsolicited photo nobody asked for, keeps reading the conversation instead of deleting it, randomly sends the group $200, and somehow secures himself an invitation to their bachelor weekend so he can “study” Gen Z. Sure. Why not?
From there, the movie basically turns into a string of Saturday Night Live sketch pitches where somebody says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if…?” They stumble into a drug kingpin, uncover a whale penis smuggling operation, get an unexpected visit from a bridal party, watch Kevin Hart drink entirely too much Pepto-Bismol, and bounce from one increasingly absurd situation to the next. The problem is that unlike The Hangover, none of these detours actually push the story forward. They’re just disconnected comedy sketches that eventually end so Kevin Hart can go back to work and give another presentation. None of what happens over the weekend has much of anything to do with helping him succeed at his job.
I kept hoping the movie would realize it had Marcello Hernandez sitting right there and actually let him steal the show the way Zach Galifianakis did in The Hangover. Instead, Hernandez spends much of the film blending into the background. If you watched the most recent season of Saturday Night Live, it’s obvious Lorne Michaels has identified him as one of the show’s biggest breakout stars now that Bowen Yang has moved on, but Tim Story never seems interested in taking advantage of that. Even the bachelor at the center of the weekend never feels like the focus because Will essentially hijacks the entire trip, throwing money around like it’s meaningless. He rents houses, chases yachts, and bankrolls one ridiculous idea after another, leaving me wondering what on Earth this guy’s salary is that none of this spending ever seems to matter.
I really wanted this movie to work because Netflix has been struggling with comedy for me lately. I didn’t care for Ladies First. I wasn’t a fan of Little Brother. Meanwhile, some of their dramatic films, like Voicemails for Isabel and Remarkably Bright Creatures, have been considerably stronger. That’s what makes 72 Hours so disappointing. I look at this cast and see people who are genuinely funny, but the material never gives them anything to build on. Sometimes I wonder if Netflix even test screens these movies or provides meaningful creative feedback, or if they’ve simply decided through an algorithm how much money to spend on a recognizable cast, assuming it’ll land in the Top 10 for a couple of weeks before the next celebrity-driven original takes its place.
I’m sure there will be people who enjoy 72 Hours, but I don’t think this is an age issue. My sense of humor still lines up with plenty of what younger audiences enjoy when they’re not buried in TikTok or YouTube. I just don’t think this movie is funny. Netflix benefits from the fact that a younger generation hasn’t necessarily seen many of the raunchier studio comedies that took bigger swings years ago, but that doesn’t make this one work. Everybody involved deserved better. Kevin Hart has made better movies. Marcello Hernandez deserves a project built around his talents to see if he can become the next major Saturday Night Live breakout. Even Tim Story, looking across his career, may have directed his weakest film here. It’s close with Tom and Jerry, but I honestly think I like 72 Hours even less.
The film does include audio description, and it does exactly what I expected it to do. It clearly describes all of the increasingly ridiculous “boys gone wild” antics throughout the movie, and I didn’t have any complaints with the track itself.
72 Hours feels like 72 years. Watching Kevin Hart try to psychoanalyze twenty-somethings is surprisingly unfunny in a film that confuses chaos with comedy and crudeness with wit. I don’t enjoy giving bad reviews, and one advantage of being an independent critic without assignments is that I usually have the freedom to skip movies that don’t interest me, which naturally leads to more positive reviews. I wanted to like Ladies First because of Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike. I wanted to like Little Brother because I enjoy John Cena and Eric André. And I wanted to like this because I genuinely like Kevin Hart and Marcello Hernandez. Unfortunately, putting actors I enjoy into the same movie isn’t enough. What matters is the script, and this one never makes the cut.
Rotten: 4.8/10
