Mark Reviews Movies: ME TIME

Me Time, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 25, 2022

Me Time once again has Kevin Hart trying to compensate for an absence of any real jokes. The actor is put in this position so often that one kind of hopes he gets a bonus for every gag he improvises that makes it into the final cut.

The story here at least seems almost as random as the jokes the movie does possess. It opens with Hart's Sonny and the character's best friend Huck (Mark Wahlberg) about to jump from a tall rock pillar in the desert and glide using wingsuits. The occasion is Huck's birthday, which he has turned into an annual event of over-the-top proportions.

Sonny doesn't want to glide, but the helicopter that brought the group to the stone tower departs before he can leave. The rotating blades blow Sonny over the side, and Huck jumps after him and helps his buddy glide—until a flock of birds apparently sends him plummeting to what surely would be a grisly death. If the laughable green screen effect of this scene is indication, maybe Hart does get a bonus for all the jokes he makes up on the spot.

There is at least a bit of truth to the setup, in which almost two decades pass and the two friends' lives take very different directions. Sonny becomes a family man, married to successful architect Maya (Regina Hall) and the father of two kids (played by Che Tafari and Amentii Sledge). As a stay-at-home dad, his life revolves around fatherhood and being involved in the kids' activities. Meanwhile, Huck is still out on adventures with people decades his junior, and Sonny finds his best friend's arrested development to be a bit much. They haven't seen each other in a few years, and Sonny has started ignoring Huck's phone calls.

From there, director John Hamburg's screenplay seems to invent complications on the spot, rushes through the comedic potential of each one, and moves on to the next without developing any sense of logic or momentum. The first step is that Sonny is going to have some time to himself, because Maya realizes she doesn't really spend much time with the couple's kids (The punch line here has Maya and the couple's daughter walk in on him watching porn and prepping for the next part, and that's about it). Obviously, Sonny is going to get together with Huck, who's preparing to celebrate his 44th birthday with another extravagant adventure.

Wahlberg, by the way, is slightly amusing in this role, although the character never quite moves beyond being anything more than a plot device. One of the few virtues of thinly written comedies that depend on the comedic talents of their stars to carry everything is seeing the potential of an unlikely dynamic between two actors. In theory, that could be the case here, but Huck exists, not as a sparring partner or counterpoint to Sonny's personality, but as a reason that the plot continues to become more and more complicated.

In this case, he's in debt to a loan shark (played by Jimmy O. Yang) for more than $40,000. After the initial scenes of the party (where the joke—speaking generously, of course—is that Sonny confronts a mountain lion while he's trying to do his business in a bucket), that doesn't even become the foundation of the plot. After all, there's another thread here, which has to do with Sonny being jealous of his wife's wealthy client Armando (Luis Gerardo Méndez). Sonny's convinced that the rich man is trying to woo Maya, so he breaks into the guy's house with Huck, makes a mess of the place, and accidentally gets the man's prized tortoise run over by a car.

There's too much to explain how any of this makes much sense within the context of the setup of guy spending some time alone and re-uniting with a party animal friend. That sense of having so many plot threads, random setups for jokes (that don't really pay off), and additional complications thrown at us—before even any of the simple elements of this story, these characters, and the general comedic purpose are established—is simultaneously overwhelming, because it's simply too much, and underwhelming, because the filmmakers of Me Time clearly don't know what to do with these jokes beyond how weirdly random they are.

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