'72 Hours' Is Not the Worst Kevin Hart Netflix Movie

“Not the worst” Kevin Hart Netflix movie is both the highest praise I could possibly offer 72 Hours and the lowest possible bar to clear, given Hart’s desultory history with the streamer. Who remembers Lift? Or Me Time? Or The Man from Toronto? I don’t. I’ve seen all three, reviewed two of them, and the only thing I could tell you about them without looking them up is that they starred Kevin Hart and that one probably took place in Toronto.

Ask me in six months weeks and I probably won’t remember anything about 72 Hours, either. It’s another one of those streaming movies with big stars where the writers — in this case, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg (Cobra Kai) — essentially write a generic script with generic jokes and assume that the comedian being paid millions of dollars can make it funny. But it doesn’t work like that! Like, write jokes, y’all! Kevin Hart is not that funny on his own, and even if he were, you don’t hand, I dunno, Wolfgang Puck a slice of American cheese and some rice and say: Make some magic! You still need good ingredients!

Kevin Hart plays Joe, an aging ad executive who is about to lose his job if he can’t figure out how to create campaigns that appeal to the younger generation. He finds some strangers on the Internet who are having a bachelor party, and he basically agrees to rent out a mansion and buy them lots of stuff if they’ll agree to invite him. Lots of terrible things happen over the course of the weekend; they inadvertently steal drugs from a cartel; a group of women rob them; Kevin Hart drinks too much Pepto Bismol and pukes all over everyone. But even though the guys at the bachelor party initially think that Joe is a weird old guy invading their space, they eventually bond over their shared trauma, everyone becomes best friends, and Joe realizes that he needs to grow up and propose to his girlfriend (Teyana Taylor, criminally wasted).

It’s the bare bones of a movie, but the only reason it’s marginally better than the other Kevin Hart movies is that he’s not starring opposite established stars like Woody Harrelson or Mark Wahlberg, who are also phoning it in, but opposite three SNL cast members — Marcello Hernandez, Ben Marshall, and Kam Patterson — who are legitimately better than Kevin Hart at making a decent meal out of American cheese because they still care. Yes, like Hart, they are also cashing a paycheck, but unlike Hart, they still feel the need to exert effort so that they will get more paychecks. The three of them (and Gen Z heartthrob Mason Gooding) are actually delightful in an otherwise middling film.

And they’re the reason 72 Hours clears the “not the worst” bar, and they’re also the reason it’s such a shame. Give these guys a script that was actually written — jokes and all — and you might have something worth remembering past next week. Instead, they’re the good ingredients wasted on a chef who stopped trying years ago. My advice: don’t rush to your Netflix queue, but if it autoplays after something else, you could do worse. And in the Kevin Hart-Netflix catalog, “you could do worse” is the nicest thing I could possibly write.