72Hours

Some films are trying to be great. 72 Hours is trying to make you laugh on a Friday night when you have had a long week and you do not want to think. Judged by that job, it works. Kevin Hart plays Joe, a forty year old marketing executive whose boss tells him he has lost touch with young people. Then he gets accidentally added to a group chat for a bachelor party in Miami. Instead of leaving the chat like a normal person, he shows up.

That is it. That is the whole idea. And it is a good one, because everybody knows that feeling of being the oldest person in the room and pretending you are not.

The joke that keeps working

The film is at its best when it is just Hart standing next to people ten years younger than him, getting everything slightly wrong. The clothes. The slang. The confidence. Marcello Hernández, Mason Gooding, Kam Patterson and Ben Marshall play the young crew, and the group chemistry between them is real. A lot of the best lines feel like they were not in the script.

Tim Story has directed Hart before on Ride Along, and he knows exactly what to do with him. Point the camera at Kevin Hart, let him panic, and get out of the way. Teyana Taylor is very good in the middle of all of it. Michael Mando shows up and adds a bit of danger.

Yes, you have seen this before

Let us be fair about it. This is The Hangover with a group chat. Miami, a wild weekend, a crime subplot that nobody really needed, a lot of jokes below the belt. The plot is basically an excuse and the film never pretends otherwise.

The crime storyline is the weakest part. Every time the film leaves the comedy to remember it has a plot, the energy drops. It would have been a better film at ninety minutes with less story and more hanging out.

Why I still liked it

Critics have been very hard on this one. It landed at fourteen percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a number you usually see for something unwatchable. Then it went straight to number one on Netflix worldwide.

I am with the audience on this. The film is not clever, and it is not trying to be. It is warm, it moves fast, it never gets mean about its own characters, and it made me laugh out loud more than once. There is also something quietly honest underneath it. This is a film about a man realising he is not young anymore, and it lets him actually feel that for a second before going back to the jokes.

Not everything lands. Some of the humour is very lazy. But the cast is having a good time and that is contagious, and a comedy that keeps you smiling for an hour and forty five minutes has done its job.