As I write this, it is National Cinema Day here in the U.S. and the U.K. Movie tickets at cineplexes are priced at only $3.00 just for today. If you took advantage of that wonderful discount and saw the new Kevin Hart comedy, ME TIME, that would have been $3.00 more than you should have spent. This new buddy comedy is on Netflix -- and I sat through it so you don't have to. The movie runs 1 hour and 35 minutes which is probably the same amount of time that director John Hamburg spent writing the script. Hart plays the devoted stay-at-home dad in suburban Sherman Oaks. His wife, played by the versatile and gifted Regina Hall, has a busy career as an architect. Mark Wahlberg stars as the dad's longtime best friend, an unconventional guy who has a history of getting his conventional buddy into some wacky and wild misadventures. Dad is stressed out dealing with housework, the kids and school activities. And he's jealous of his wife's handsome Latino co-worker. Dad wants some time to himself. In comes the best friend to, once again, lead his married buddy astray in the name of fun.
This could have been a light, entertaining movie. What we get is something like an enjoyable episode of BLACK-ISH that devolves into a lame 90 minutes-long frat boy party. It's weighed down by bathroom humor, gags about middle-aged sex, four-letter words and situations that just make no damn sense. What hurts the most is that ME TIME boasts a talented cast: Kevin Hart, Mark Wahlberg, Regina Hall plus veteran sitcom actors John Amos and Anna Maria Horsford. Seal makes a very cool special guest appearance to do a musical number with Hart.
Before ME TIME dropped on Netflix, entertainment news ran with the amusing story that Mark Wahlberg had to stand naked for a scene on his first day of filming. Well...director/writer John Hamburg does give us an appreciable amount of time to gaze at Wahlberg's bare butt -- yet even that eye candy cannot make up for a bad script and a waste of good talent.
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