Critic Reviews

72 Hours scores some laughs by virtue of the comedic talent of its cast, but the gonzo plotting feels weightless without anything to really invest in. Add to that the hit-and-miss nature of the jokes, and you get a film that's mostly a wasted opportunity.

The humor is broad and crude and often genuinely funny. The younger comedians are excellent foils for Hart, who himself remains an uncanny talent.

In some sense, the plot mechanics are merely an excuse to perform toilet bowl gags (there are more dick jokes here than you can count). And yet, there’s some unquestionable charm to seeing Hart’s well-worn comedic impulses collide with a script whose references appear to be just as dated.

It’s not particularly funny but some of the characters feel real, or real enough for this kind of genre exercise, and they earn our affection.

The movie is a just-sly-enough commentary on Hart’s own comic tastes clashing with more contemporary sensibilities. That knowingness doesn’t necessarily save 72 Hours from the kind of fill-in-the-blanks hijinks of broad comedies you’d expect.

The latest in Kevin Hart’s long line of threadbare, throwaway comedies.

There’s some funny material with a gaggle of nefarious party girls preying on dumb bros; that ensuing slapstick brawl actually has some life to it. But any time 72 Hours threatens to launch into full-blown mayhem, Story and Hart throttle the momentum.

The meta-joke about an actor trapped inside his own midlife-crisis character doesn’t merely fall flat; it underscores the movie’s fatal flaw: 72 Hours would have far more potential if Hart weren’t in it at all. The insecurities that once made him relatable aren’t comic any more. They’re sad.

Any stabs at cultural satire about, say, Gen Z’s addiction to documenting their lives on social media, are subsumed by the crazy action-comedy shenanigans, with the younger cast, all of whom have proven themselves funny on prior occasions, unable to elevate the pedestrian material.

Story’s body of work is not unlike Hart’s, in that every pretty good movie he’s made is significantly outnumbered by bad ones. His latest falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum: It isn’t totally awful, but it strains to communicate how much fun the audience should be having instead of, well, just being fun.