’72 Hours’ Review: Kevin Hart Crashes a Bachelor Party in Netflix’s Convoluted Attempt at Generational Satire

The best movies often come from the simplest of premises. So the fact that “72 Hours” is about a middle-aged advertising executive who faces a professional crossroads after his boss decides to reconsider his upcoming promotion to chief creative officer, only to find himself accidentally added to a group chat with four frat bros half his age before offering to pay for their upcoming bachelor party trip to Miami in exchange for letting him (a total stranger) accompany them for market research on young people should tell you something about its quality.

If that sounds convoluted in prose, try watching it as a Netflix movie that dutifully restates its premise every few minutes for multi-screen viewers. Tim Story’s new comedy jumps through a truly absurd amount of hoops in order to set up the meat of an otherwise simple movie about five guys who take a 72-hour bachelor trip and have to navigate the hilarious fact that Kevin Hart is older than the others. It’s hard to say if it makes it better or worse that Marcello Hernández never stops pointing out how weird it is that Hart is on the trip with them — he is objectively right, but he spells it out so many times that it’s hard not to wonder why nobody gave that note during the script development process and killed the idea altogether.

But that’s the setup we’re left to work with. After accepting a sarcastic invitation that was never really meant for him, Joe (Hart) finds himself as the honorary “unc” to Nick (Hernández), Mason (Mason Gooding), Freshman (Kam Patterson), and Hunter (Ben Marshall) during their last weekend of bromance before Mason ties the knot. While the prerequisite Miami bachelor party antics — party buses, yacht parties, and accidentally stealing 30 kilos of cocaine from a cartel boss — all occur, the film tries to root itself in some real pathos about the nature of male friendships. There’s plenty of stereotypical ribbing about marriage being a prison that Mason is entering by choice, even if the groom-to-be makes it clear that he’s put off by his friends’ old-fashioned attitudes. Joe, in turn, is shocked by how open the young men are about their feelings, characterized by their nightly “emotional check-ins” before they hit the town.

The heavy-handed commentary about generational differences and evolving male attitudes is frequently wrapped in the language of advertising, with Joe frequently making phone calls back to his office to document his revelations as if he’s Jane Goodall studying the apes. There’s something paradoxically authentic about an off-the-rack streaming comedy being so blatant about its obsession with demographics and user engagement, but it’s also hard to believe that someone who remains this clueless about “the youth” could have had enough of a career in advertising to even get him to this crossroads.

Clocking in at around an hour and 45 minutes and anchored by a willing performance from Hart, “72 Hours” is far from the worst Netflix original comedy you could stream this weekend. But potential viewers should still be warned that it has more in common with “Red Notice” than “The Hangover.” It still boasts that noxious blend of action and comedy (without fully committing to either) that plagues so many direct-to-streaming movies, and it features both a plotline about Hart turning into a Spanish-speaking drug lord whenever he does a line of cocaine and an excessive vomiting sequence with some of the worst effects you’ll see all year.

It’s not without laughs, but the entire film feels like something the old Joe would have soullessly engineered to sell something. If nothing else, it has a great tagline — “He puts the ‘unc’ in ‘uncool” is quite brilliant — which feels like a fitting destiny for a film that never tries to be much more than a flashy consumer product.

Grade: C-

“72 Hours” is now streaming on Netflix.