Me Time (2022)

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Whelp. Me Time, the latest Kevin Hart comedy from his multi-film deal with Netflix, starts off with an embarrassingly awful CGI gag and somehow manages to get worse the longer it runs. Less than a minute later Hart slips on turtle poo in his upscale kitchen while Instagramming his kids’ lunches. It turns out to be one of the few highlights of what can only be described, charitably, as a comedy.

Like most of Adam Sandler’s contractual Netflix comedies (but not all), Me Time is the result of a studio that no longer has to care about box-office from their bankable star… or quality. I’m convinced nobody involved in the making of the thing even cares if you watch. If you forget to shut off the app, you might have without knowing it. Thanks, analytics.

Sonny (Kevin Hart) is the perfect father. Maybe a little too perfect. Only being Super Dad has made him insufferable to everyone around him. Even his loving wife (Regina Hall) thinks he needs a break, which comes in the form of his childhood bestie Huck (Mark Wahlberg), who offers him salvation in HuckChella, Huck’s self-titled birthday celebration of himself.

Things spiral out of control when Sonny suspects his perfect wife may be cheating on him and a subplot about Huck’s fiances help extend the runtime. That’s right; we’ve come full-circle in comedies from fathers who care too little to fathers who care too much. Plus three jokes with Kevin Hart sticking food down his pants (two specially about his ass, black and claw). That’s Me Time for you, a raunchy comedy with terrible comedy and sexless raunch.

Pretty much everyone involved here is awful, Hart especially, with the possible exceptions of Wahlberg and Hall who seem semi-aware of the type of movie they’re in. Maybe the funniest thing about Me Time, which promises a Hart/Wahlberg buddy comedy, is how the two have zero chemistry onscreen – and how Wahlberg disappears for most of the movie so he can go make better movies.

Poor Jimmy O. Yang, once again reduced to a fake accented one-joke loan shark. Can you believe they dragged John Amos into this? I almost cried. When Seal (yes, that Seal) shows up I wanted to tap out, and I love Seal.

Writer/director John Hamburg (Along Came Polly, Why Him?) has made a career assembling drek like this but never this drekky. It looks cheap, even by Netflix standards, with so much dialogue added via ADR it sounds like an old Popeye cartoon. A gag with CGI mountain lions (that goes on way too long) made me question if the filmmakers even know what comedy is. Has CGI ever been funny in comedy?

Me Time is one of the most excruciatingly bad comedies in recent memory, possibly ever. This movie is aggressively unfunny, coming off like a cynical exercise in algorithmic film production than something anyone would ever want to actually watch. It feels like “content” designed to play itself in the background after you pass out, and given how Netflix poops these things out it probably is. It takes a lot to make crap like Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star look like a masterpiece, but that may be this film’s one accomplishment.