Watch ’72 Hours’ on Netflix.
Trust a group of broke young men to let a complete stranger crash their bachelor party simply because he offers to pay for the trip. Had it been a group of women, they’d have called the police instead.
Directed by Tim Story, 72 Hours stars Kevin Hart (‘Me Time’, ‘The Man From Toronto’) as Joe, a 40-year-old marketing executive who accidentally gets added to a bachelor party group chat full of twenty-somethings. Sensing an opportunity to study his target audience for a high-stakes ad pitch, he shamelessly invites himself along by offering to bankroll the gang’s three-day Miami getaway.
Joe soon meets up with the Gen Z squad in Miami: there’s the goody-two-shoes groom Mason Moses (Mason Gooding), his whiny, unemployed best man Nick (Marcello Hernández), who’s hilariously jealous about losing his bestie to a wife, the awkward, depressed party-pooper Hunter (Ben Marshall), who can’t stop moping over his recent break-up, and Freshman (Kam Patterson), a clueless, permanently spaced-out weirdo whose sheer obliviousness somehow makes him oddly adorable.
Ironically, even though Kevin Hart is the primary protagonist, Joe is easily the least funny and least likeable character in 72 Hours. He tries far too hard to fit in with the younger men (who BTW, call him ‘unc’), and yes, that could’ve made for riotous The Hangover-style comedy, but this just isn’t it. The plot throws drinking, drugs, gangsters, scammers and every imaginable bachelor-party cliché at the group, but even then the comedy somehow never reaches the chaotic heights it could have.
The only scene that genuinely had me laughing out loud was one in which a random cameo character mistakes Joe for the group’s pimp. A few other hilarious moments are similarly driven more by the situations than the characters themselves. The bachelor squad makes for an amusing comedic ensemble, but their chemistry is constantly undercut whenever Joe becomes the centre of attention.
I couldn’t even watch 72 Hours in one sitting. Despite running just 1 hour and 45 minutes, it somehow took me nearly six hours to finish. Maybe, just maybe, this falls into the “so bad, it’s good” category for some viewers. But in Gen Z slang, this comedy is mostly just… mid. The bright, beachy Miami setting and some catchy background music help make it a little more watchable.
On a side not: watching the gorgeous Teyana Taylor as Kevin Hart’s doctor girlfriend is easily one of the film’s best highlights.
If you’ve run out of comedy titles, stream ’72 Hours’ on Netflix.
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