“Me Time,” a slapdash comedy by writer-director John Hamburg (“I Love You, Man”), stars Kevin Hart as Sonny Fisher, a stay-at-home father or mother affected by what Betty Friedan labeled “the issue with no identify.” Sonny feels lonely and out-of-step round adults with considerations extra grown-up than his fixation on minivan know-how, elementary college expertise reveals and a proposal to incorporate plant-based milks within the cafeteria. His spouse Maya (Regina Corridor), a high-powered architect, proposes that he press pause on his home obligations to reconnect together with his personal inside wants. She’ll take their two youngsters Sprint and Ava (Che Tafari and Amentii Sledge) over spring break if he’ll comply with attend the forty fourth birthday blowout extravaganza of his childhood finest buddy Huck (Mark Wahlberg), a footloose, Peter Pan-esque occasion boy whose firm isn’t far more mature.
This can be a story about male friendship with little or no plausible onscreen bonding. (The opening credit quantity, “Greatest Buddy Tune” by Rozzi, does half of the heavy lifting.) Hamburg’s fundamental gag is that Sonny and Huck symbolize two extremes of the fashionable American male: Sonny represents the dad decided to shatter outdated gender stereotypes of fireplace and residential, whereas Huck embraces the brand new earth-nurturing bohemian wild man. If pressed, they’d in all probability discover widespread floor espousing the therapeutic properties of goji berries of their morning smoothie.
In apply, Sonny is reluctant to attend Huckchella, the desert rave Huck is throwing in his personal honor (hashtag: #letsgethuckedup). He’s uncomfortable across the different company, almost all twentysomethings who dabble in beekeeping, herbalism, nudity and slackline gymnastics, and downright panicked when Huck palms everybody an identical observe swimsuit and a machete, sends them off to forage a communal supper, and, that evening, howls in sluggish movement underneath a statue of himself. (Manufacturing designer Theresa Guleserian’s wry manner of externalizing Huck’s ego lands one of the best jokes within the film.)
Tilt your head a technique at Huck and he appears to be like like a cult chief. Tilt your head the opposite manner and Wahlberg and Hamburg enable him to seem like a ridiculous try-hard determined to remain related. Blink, and in that point the movie can have determined it doesn’t actually care which one you consider — it’s already moved on to its subsequent concept, and the following and so forth, in its personal manic desperation to maintain the viewers entertained.
The movie feels as if it was put collectively the best way a tumbleweed snatches up stray leaves and feathers. It bounces from location to location, gag to gag, including aspect character and cameos (together with the pop singer Seal) with subsequent to no narrative momentum. In a single scene, Hart and Wahlberg are tasked to offer mouth-to-mouth to a tortoise. Later, a baby who’s totally unrelated to the story halts the plot to carry out Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” (A minimum of the singer, Kayden Alexander Koshelev, is nice.) No story beat lingers for longer than a couple of minutes, even those centered round enjoyable performers like Shira Gross as a finger-breaking goon, Luis Gerardo Méndez as a rich toothbrush influencer who needs to lure Maya to a personal island hideaway, or Diane Delano as a volunteer crossing guard launched as a warning of what Sonny would possibly turn into — his Ghost of Schoolyard Future — and whose backstory is accompanied by a pathetic tinkling of piano, composer Jeff Cardoni’s cleverest flourish.
The disarray is baffling for the viewers, and downright punishing for Hart, whose lead character is pressured to shape-shift between scenes, veering from milquetoast to petty to tyrannical to pushed-around. In a film the place Hart projectile vomits, defecates on a mattress and is cradled like a pet, his best indignity comes on the climax when, for 5 complete minutes, he’s pressured to faux that is an emotional drama worthy of a giant speech concerning the life classes he’s realized. “I did a whole lot of stuff that I’m not pleased with,” he says. Sentimental music putters within the background. A crowd of fogeys audibly awwws. And the movie breezes onto the following bit it hopes will get fun.
