Kevin Hart loves making movies with a partner, be it The Rock, Ice Cube, Will Ferrell, The Rock, Bryan Cranston, Tiffany Haddish, Woody Harrelson or, you know, The Rock. Me Time thus dutifully adheres to the Hart template, pairing him with Mark Wahlberg in yet another effort in which he embodies a neutered, panicky pipsqueak struggling to reclaim his manliness opposite a macho stud. If you’ve endured a Hart film before, you’ve already seen writer/director John Hamburg’s visually drab, comedically challenged Netflix feature (Aug. 26), which only distinguishes itself by being arguably the least funny entry in the star’s entire canon.
Me Time wastes no time situating viewers in hackneyed Hart terrain. In a flashback to 15 years earlier, Sonny (Hart) is attending the over-the-top birthday party of his friend Huck Dembo (Wahlberg), during which they and others are going wingsuit flying. This isn’t as crazy as the fact that Sonny’s best friend is named “Huck Dembo,” which sounds less like a person than something you’d spend hours searching for at Home Depot. Nonetheless, it suitably freaks out Sonny, whose trepidation turns to terror when he’s accidentally blown off a cliff, thereby compelling Huck to save him and, in the process, confirm that he’s always there for his best bud. In this moment of brotherly bonding, Sonny promises to attend all of Huck’s subsequent birthday bashes.
Fast forward to the present, and Sonny is the sort of lame-o that is Hart’s specialty. Living in Sherman Oaks, California, with his wife Maya (Regina Hall) and his kids Dash (Che Tafari) and Ava (Amentii Sledge), Sonny is the epitome of emasculation: he’s a stay-at-home dad who supports his clan while architect Maya functions as the breadwinner; he’s the PTA president who’s overseeing the middle school talent show; he drives an old minivan that doesn’t have automatic doors; he pratfalls around the kitchen like a clown; he’s out of his element at Maya’s gala work events, where he’s also threatened by his spouse’s hunky and successful client Armando (Luis Gerardo Méndez); and, rather than spending spring break with Huck, who’s hosting a blowout get-together for his 44th birthday, he’s going on a trip with his family to visit his in-laws. He’s a suburban domesticated dork and for that is mocked and humiliated by just about everyone he meets—no matter the backhanded praise he receives for being so good at his duties.
Following a series of scenarios that establish Sonny as a figurative eunuch with a giant Napoleon complex, Me Time provides him with a shot at redemptive transformation when Maya, realizing that her career has prevented her from getting to know her kids, decides to take Dash and Ava by herself to her parents’ house, thereby giving Sonny a week of “me time.” This, of course, simply leads to more embarrassment and failure for Sonny, who can’t masturbate to ’90s porn without being interrupted, vomits up all the BBQ he’s been craving, and is roundly defeated at golf by a trio of elderly Asian women. Rather than throw in the towel, though, Sonny decides to join Huck for his party. At their first reunion, Huck appears buck naked, thereby underlining his own manliness in relation to Sonny’s wimpiness. Once out in the California desert for what amounts to Huck’s personal Burning Man shindig, Sonny suffers similar mortifications, from being chased off a portable toilet by a female mountain lion (because, you see, women are tougher than him), to being held up by his fellow revelers for a group photo like an awkward child.
At this celebration, Sonny earns himself the moniker “The Big Dog,” yet Me Time means for that nickname to be ironic, since he’s more house cat than “primal” beast. Things take a disastrous turn when loan shark Stan (Jimmy O. Yang) arrives at the gathering demanding that Huck settle an outstanding $47,000 debt, and then torches the place to prove his point. It’s at this juncture that Hamburg’s tale indulges in the first of its dreary switcheroos, revealing Huck to be far less sure of himself than he outwardly appears, which is as surprising as the fact that Hart seizes every opportunity to scream and flail about in trademark bug-eyed, temper-tantrum style. It’ll shock no one that, at regular intervals throughout this mirthless affair, Hart is also demeaned as a “bitch” and a “pussy,” and told that he has no “balls,” the film underscoring his quasi-castrated condition so often that the headliner’s schtick begins to feel borderline masochistic.
Me Time piles on the tepid gags, including a prolonged bit involving an injured tortoise, but it remains painfully light on laughs. Wahlberg does a halfhearted version of his goofy-cheery musclehead routine, and Hall is saddled with a two-dimensional character designed to be both a matronly scold and a negative example of what happens when women prioritize their careers over their kids. As Sonny’s “parent friend” Alan, Andrew Santino delivers a bit of loose-cannon supporting-player energy, as does Ilia Isorelýs Paulino as a stranger who randomly becomes Huck and Sonny’s driver and takes too enthusiastically to their juvenile pranks. Those hijinks, however, are of a pitiful variety, typified by the duo going to Armando’s home to engage in some vengeful sabotage, and Sonny trying to poop on his rival’s bed but only managing to squeeze out a tiny turd because, well, he’s not a man.
There’s a dissertation to be written about Hart’s fascination with masculinity and Me Time will no doubt factor prominently into it, what with its endless jokes about how Sonny doesn’t stack up to his male compatriots. In the end, Hamburg’s lifeless comedy flips its script by arguing that everyone should be accepted for who they are—and, by extension, positing its puny protagonist as a paragon of adult male virtue. Yet like Sonny’s bumbling response to Ava’s question about whether she can have a penis (“In life, if you chose, at some point, if you wanted one…you could get it. It’s complicated…”)—which resonates as a response to critics who’ve slammed Hart for his past homophobia—it just comes off as so much facile posturing.
