by John Tillyard, Contributing Writer
In Me Time, stay-at-home dad Sonny Fisher (Kevin Hart) finally has the chance to spend some time alone when his wife Maya (Regina Hall) takes the kids with her for spring break. In doing so, Sonny gets the opportunity to reconnect with his childhood friend, Huck Dembo (Mark Wahlberg), but in ways that could prove disastrous for his marriage and his wife’s career as an architect.
The best way to summarize Wahlberg’s character is to think of another buddy comedy he starred in, Ted, and to imagine him in Ted’s role. He wants Sonny to have fun with him and forget his actual life and the responsibilities of raising his kids. The relationship between Huck and Sonny is similar to numerous buddy comedies, with many bickering sessions and the two partaking in lots of dumb ideas. It’s usually a dynamic I’m okay with in these types of comedies because the two individuals have been forced together due to odd circumstances, and I enjoy the relationship. However, in this story, these two have supposedly been best friends since the age of five, and there is no chemistry between them. Huck spends most of the runtime coming up with silly ideas that will not end well. Sonny sometimes acts as a voice of reason, but often chooses to go along with whatever Huck proposes. The most jarring of these ideas is when they go to trash the house of the man for whom Sonny’s wife works, ignoring the noticeable presence of security cameras around the site, and that doing anything to displease the person your spouse works for probably won’t help your family’s source of income, especially when you don’t work. Still, there is also a part during this sequence where Sonny defecates on the guy’s bed, but a few moments later is discouraging another person from smashing his plates in the kitchen. So the leaving of human feces is okay, but breaking crockery isn’t? The point is that Sonny doesn’t make sense even executing these bad ideas.
The structure of the whole plot is also all over the map. There are about half a dozen side characters with their little arcs that don’t amount to anything other than being running gags. But on top of these distractions from the main cast, several subplots involving the main actors exploring some interesting ideas about the value of the full-time parent, allowing others time to pursue a career. It was also refreshing to see the dad being the stay-at-home parent; I’m not sure I’ve seen that before in a story like this.
There is also a lesson near the end similar to the one in Space Jam: A New Legacyabout not trying to force your kids to do things they don’t want to, but it lacks any setup or conflict to make the payoff feel satisfying. Me Time is like that with many plot threads. They all seem to come and go randomly, with Sonny being the only consistent thing in any of them. The opening sets up a solid long-term bond between Sonny and Huck, but after that, outside of a video call, we don’t see another scene between them for more than 20 minutes. While spending the week with Huck celebrating his 44th birthday, the implication is Sonny doesn’t know or like the crazy things Huck has planned because he hasn’t seen him in a few years. But the opening scene showed him doing something crazy for his birthday with him 15 years earlier; he’s known him since he was five, but he doesn’t seem to know him at all. I guess we are supposed to think Sonny assumed Huck would have matured by 44. There appears to be a lesson by the end about how you need to grow up and take responsibility for your life, but other than being told he is in financial trouble, we don’t see anything happening to Huck to suggest there’s much wrong with his life. I’m also tired of these comedies where people in their 30s or 40s act like teenagers; guys, grow up!
But even with shortcomings in the plot, with this being a comedy, it would still be worth a watch if it was funny; sadly, it’s not for me. It’s that typical American type of comedy where the humor doesn’t come from specific gags, but more from the constant shenanigans that are going on. I can’t put my finger on how to make this type of comedy work, but I didn’t feel it worked here. The Hangover,for example, is how to do this right since the characters don’t know what has happened. But in this, Sonny chooses to do many things that happen to him, so I spent a lot of time perplexed as to why he was doing them.
Overall, Me Time is a buddy comedy where the two leads don’t feel much like buddies, and there isn’t much humor. When I read the premise, I thought it would be a mid-40s version of Ricky Business (there is a brief nod to that film, by the way), but the character of Huck quickly derails that idea in favor of random antics. The story’s structure has about as much consistency as an amoeba. Except for the two leads and maybe Sonny’s wife, we don’t spend nearly enough time with any character to fully understand their situation and relevance to the main story. In terms of laughs, there were a couple of moments that I found mildly amusing, but I never laughed aloud once, and most of the time, I struggled to pinpoint an actual joke in what was said or anything happening. Hart and Wahlberg give good performances, but work with very little to make it seem funny or worth caring about what happens.
Score: 4/10
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