Get Hard: 100 minutes of bad behaviour that’s mostly puerile but often hilarious

YOU can’t accuse Get Hard of having a misleading title. If you want sniggering schoolboy humour, you’ve come to the right place.

YOU can’t accuse Get Hard of having a misleading title.

If you want sniggering schoolboy humour, you’ve come to the right place.

Professional big baby Will Ferrell plays mega-rich stockbroker James King, who is framed for fraud and sentenced to 10 years.

Will Ferrell in a scene from Get Hard. Picture: AP

With a month to get his affairs in order, he offers the guy who washes his car, Darnell (Kevin Hart), $30,000 to toughen him up for San Quentin.

King assumes Darnell has been to prison because he’s black, a stereotype Darnell is happy to play up to because he needs the money.

He converts King’s mansion into a practice-run penitentiary — the wine cellar becomes a cell, the tennis court a prison yard — and starts running him through the likely scenarios.

Kevin Hart, left, and Calvin Harris, also known as T.I. in a scene from the film. Picture: AP

Hart’s talent for high-speed character improv is put to good use, and Ferrell is in his element playing a country-club softie hopeless at aggression and trash-talk.

Though when King meets some real-life boys in the ’hood they are ironically impressed at his ability to make money trading at the expense of other investors.

“Stockbrokers is gangsta!” one of them marvels.

A high tolerance for jokes about sodomy is essential and there’s gratuitous nudity — male and female. Still, these lowest common denominator gags have a better than average strike rate. Nothing wrong with schoolboy humour — so long as it’s funny.

Calvin Harris, also known as T.I. and Will Ferrell. Picture: AP

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Film Get Hard

Released by Roadshow

Star rating 3/5

Director Ethan Cohen

Starring Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Craig T Nelson

Rating MA15+

Running time 100 minutes

Verdict It’s puerile, but often hilarious

Originally published as Get Hard: 100 minutes of bad behaviour that’s mostly puerile but often hilarious