Well, it’s been 2 weeks. Must be time for another Kevin Hart movie.
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“About Last Night” is a remake of an earlier adaptation of the David Mamet play of the same name, focussing on two couples who are approaching love in very different ways. Michael Ealy (who you may know as the android in TV’s “Almost Human”) and Joy Bryant play the typical rom com couple who were made for each other, while Kevin Hart (who you may know from like… every movie made in the last year) and Regina Hall play the more abusive and raunchy pair. The movie follows the ups and downs of each relationship, and the friendships between the two ladies and two fellas as well. Basically in this rom-com you have Ealy and Bryant playing the rom and Hart and Hall playing the com. But how well do each of the parts work?
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Well, I can tell you right off the bat I really bought Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant in this. There’s an immediate chemistry between these two that makes for a very believable romance. And they deliver on the drama as well, carrying pretty emotional scenes with seemingly little effort. In fact, I’d say their relationship is the best thing about the movie, feeling like a true couple falling in love and dealing with the real issues that follow. Unlike Hart and Hall who feel like an unbelievable couple created to deliver punch lines.
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Now don’t get me wrong, they deliver them really well. There is a lot of funny stuff from these two. But humor is not the same as acting, and I didn’t buy those characters for one second. And honestly how you feel about this movie may come down to how you feel these two deliver on the laughs, and for me, though funny, they took me out of the movie every time they would go on a raunchy riff. And, by the way, this movie does not hold back on the raunch. Within the first few minutes you will get a very clear idea of what you are in store for, lets just say, they held nothing back. Let me be clear though, it wasn’t the sexual frankness that took me out of it, it was the over the top clowning both Hart and Hall do. While it’s worked for Kevin Hart in many other films, here, for me, it took me out of the flow of the story. Plus I kept trying to figure out what exactly was the point of their relationship, what lesson were they learning? how were they growing? But they weren’t there for character development. They were there to make over the top jokes about their own sexual appetites. One other thing I thought was worth mentioning that annoyed me, was the pervasive alcohol abuse. The way this movie treated alcohol had me wanting to stage an intervention from my seat in the middle of the theaters ninth row. I get that people party, but if the world works like this movie seems to indicate, no one over the age of 40 will have much of a liver left at all.
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Overall, “About Last Night” is a movie that will succeed or fail on the backs of it’s four stars. Two of which played believable drama and two of which became more caricature than character. Even though it was funny, I still enjoyed the rom more than the com and am going with a C+
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