I'll admit it...I am a Caucasian male who thinks Kevin Hart is one of the funniest men alive. However, that opinion may change after watching the desperately unfunny theatrical release of his newest stand up special entitled Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain. This is a forced, mostly unbearable production that has much lower quality than his cable specials do. Yet this somehow got released theatrically. The first 20 minutes of the film aren't stand up but Hart going around showing how famous he is. This is one of the most self indulgent things I've seen in a film in the past few years. Hart is a very, very, very funny man but once we get to the stand up....it's not much better. Mostly---this stand up consists of Hart not realizing that if he makes weird noises and screams all his material that it's bad material nonetheless.
In this film...he plays at Madison Square Garden. Being that he's one of the few comedians to ever play there....the film could have used a lot more emotional stuff involving how happy Hart is to be there. However, the audience gets four fairly funny jokes, one incredibly mean spirited and unnecessary joke and 20 minutes of self indulgent crap. The four jokes in question which involving the topics being late for work, a secret phrase a friend made, Hart getting caught lying about being in another country and a weird trip to a ranch are all even a bit too long. It seems as if Hart needed this to be a feature length film so it wouldn't go straight to cable. He figured the only way to do that was to extend the jokes as far as they can possibly extend without having people walk out of the theater.
He simply has no good material to work with here. These four jokes take up about 15 minutes of an hour long stand up special. Then the audience gets to hear an incredibly mean-spirited, quasi-explosive rant in which Hart goes off on a fan he met in an airport. We, the audience, get where he's coming from on this joke but it's so cruel for Hart to even bring it up in the first place that when he says what he says about the fan...we don't laugh...we cringe. Speaking of cringing...every few minutes...the film shows us a shot of the audience cracking up. Why? That's the same as having a laugh track on a sitcom. I don't want to be told when to laugh...I want to laugh at what I think is funny.
Also...Hart does this thing where he randomly has fire come up in his show. Was this supposed to be for comic effect? It's just stupid and adds nothing to the stand up. Oddly enough...Hart's last stand up theatrical special, Laugh At My Pain ran 90 minutes and everything in it added to the film. There was no randomly adding stuff on just to make it longer and damn was it funny. Now...Hart takes a step backwards and has his newest one last 75 minutes with way too much filler stuff. It's almost as if Hart NEEDED to have this out ASAP. I don't think he needed the money but something must be going on where he just had to force out a film to make some quick cash.
This stand up special also features Hart doing something no comedian should ever do. In the middle of a joke about bums...Hart takes about five minutes to laugh at his own joke rather than tell the rest of it. This is almost like him saying "look at how funny I am...I can laugh at my own jokes." As with the rest of Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain....it wasn't funny or necessary...it was just plain dumb.
(1 and 1/2 out of 5 Stars, The film is rated R for pervasive language including sexual references)
No comments:
Post a Comment