Me Time is a definite step up from The Man From Toronto in terms of Netflix buddy comedies starring Kevin Hart, but it doesn’t exactly follow a basement-to-penthouse progression. It more closely resembles metaphorically leaving the basement and entering a lobby with several elevators, not knowing which one to take and remaining on the ground floor, perplexed. Mark Wahlberg is a far better straight man for Hart than Woody Harrelson, but the writers would benefit from knowing what to do with that pairing. Wahlberg, who excels at playing dazed or clueless, has the exact deadpan that triggers Hart’s overanxious freaking out. But, all too often, they’re stuck making fertilizer when they should be spinning comedy gold from the straw of its featherweight plot.
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Me Time Review – Hart & Wahlberg Struggle in Self-Care Comedy
Give John Hamburg, the Meet The Parents screenwriter and Along Came Polly director, a cookie for giving Wahlberg’s character the name “Huck Dembo.” That scene, which starts with Hart tripping over tortoise poop twice, is arguably the funniest in the entire movie.
Hart plays Sonny Fisher, a super-househusband who always makes perfect school lunches, helps his children in building dioramas and LEGO Death Stars, and always brings the good bagels to school meetings. Sure, he feels slightly out of his element when he attends work-related dinners with his superstar architect wife Maya (Regina Hall), but she can’t keep track of which languages her children speak, so he’s got her there.
Sonny’s childhood best friend is Huck Dembo. Huck has been throwing the craziest YOLO-themed birthday bashes for years, which Sonny eventually had to miss because he had a family. Even though Sonny adores his role as superdad, everyone else is convinced he needs a break. So, at Maya’s urging, he bows out of his family vacation to stay at home alone for a while, hoping that other parent-friends will join him. When that fails, he reluctantly agrees to attend Huck’s latest wild party.
That’s a lot of setup, but instead of providing a payoff, the film keeps providing fresh setups. It’s as if the studio had several concepts and decided to use them all at once, serving none of them well. It’s funny to imagine a suburban dad struggling to survive at a Burning Man festival gone wrong. It’s funny when a best friend provokes a jealous husband to act out excessively in retaliation. It might be humorous for one of your super-efficient friends to bail out your reckless friend from a loan shark debt. But because Hamburg doesn’t choose one of those lanes and stick to it, none of those establishing ideas ever reach the necessary levels of craziness.
With a similar character dynamic, The Hangover films always knew which elements of the plot were supporting the main mystery. Me Time is all side quests. The family will eventually return from their vacation and Sonny will get back to his regularly scheduled life, regardless of what mischief Sonny gets up to in the interim. Huck, on the other hand, is so resilient that there isn’t much room for real growth, despite the fact that he occasionally shows signs of insecurity—for not measuring up to George Clooney.
It could simply be the result of a lengthy development process—if so, why isn’t this more developed?— But jokes about Burning Man and the LA Weekly, for example, aren’t exactly cutting edge. The joke about a turd on someone’s bed is probably coincidental, thanks to the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case—the timing doesn’t seem to work for it to be directly inspired—but the explanation of a “upper decker” is, of course, redundant to anyone who’s ever seen MacGruber.
