Night School (Dir. Malcolm D Lee, 1 h 51m)

At time of writing, I've reviewed nearly 90 films, and Night School easily counts among the five worst I've seen. Bad films, are of course, a subjective thing, and films slide easily between various shades of bad. Night School is the boring kind of bad, with Kevin Hart trotting through various elements of his stand-up-routine tacked to the oft-repeated plotline of high school dropout having to return to school to further his career, whilst clearly funny actors are not allowed to be funny, our protagonist barely grows throughout a hackneyed plot, and everyone is very boring for nearly two hours.

Kevin Hart...plays Kevin Hart. Sure, his character has a name, but it's Hart treading out his short angry man routine, exploring his career and relationships (or, in this film, lack thereof, with Hart's entire quest to finally pass his GED in order to restart his career and keep his relationship with his fiance alive) that forms the backbone to much of his comedy. This in itself would not be so bad if Hart subverted his comedic personality, or if we saw any growth in the dropout hustler trying to keep a web of lies together, but neither occur, except for a tacked on Aesoep towards the end of the film.

Having failed the GED he works towards for the majority of the film, and with his girlfriend leaving him, as his web of lies  Hart, to be entirely fair to himself, does finally begin to grow, understanding that much of her persona is a coping mechanism against his learning difficultities, and beginning to realise that his abilities academically are better than he realises.  Finally in the last twenty minutes, he grows as a person, with the speech he delivers at the end of the film as he finally graduates the one truly good moment of the film, whilst his admittance to his fiance that he may need help economically, and trying to start again is writing that the film needed from the very beginning.

Around Kevin-Hart-Playing-Kevin-Hart are a motley crew of characters who in another film would be well rounded, interesting, funny and diverse. They are precisely one of these things, if only to prove that boredom, like everything else, can be equal opportunity. These range from a hispanic waiter who Hart earlier gets fired through the film's one truly grossout joke, involving a set of pubic hairs that get far too much discussion and analysis for one film who wants to be a dental hygenist, to a conspiracy theorist convinced that robots are out to get him to a teenage delinquent, a stressed stay at home mother and a simple-minded but likable manual worker. Whilst there are some elements of good writing in these characters, it's so spread out over the group that all of them are so one note.

As for the film's other star, the teacher of the night class that Hart has to enrole in, Carrie, played by Tiffany Haddish is another funny actress given too little to do-admittedly, she is somewhat more dimensional than her pupils, and her comedic rapport with Hart is undoubtedly good, but in general, she's another poorly written, painfully stereotypical sassy black woman, whose sexuality is thrown in as a joke, her tightening teaching budget and frustration with workload swept under the carpet, and in general, much of what could have been an interestign character arc.

What Night School is, sadly, is a missed opportunity. The comedy floats between slapstick with an irritating lack of timing, with Hart being punched and kicked in a mixed martial arts ring to focus his mind and bypass his mental processing issues, tiring adolscenent humour around bodily functions, the afformentioned pubic hair, farting, etc etc, whilst the film's socio-political, and observational humour is so scattergun, and largely focuses around jokes about race, with the pubic hair on-cheesecake joke sprawling off into an entire Hart diatribe about racism, whilst the conspiracy theorist of the group's increasing delusions about the role of computers and robots in the workplace seems to lampoon, badly, everything from conspiracy theorists to activists to African americans in general.

There are many ways this could be a good film, but it has neither the writing nor the guts, nor can Hart and co be bothered to make it nasty or focused enough to make this at least decent premise work. F. Fail. Must try harder.

Rating: Avoid