Me Time Review

Last Updated on August 30, 2022

Plot: When a stay-at-home dad finds himself with some “me time” for the first time in years while his wife and kids are away, he reconnects with his former best friend for a wild weekend that nearly upends his life.

Review: Kevin Hart is anything if not consistent. Over the course of his big screen career, Hart has consistently played the same character time and again: the lovable straight man who invariably loses his cool and hilarious results follow. From Night School and Central Intelligence to Jumanji and Ride Along, Hart has never come close to matching the energy of his stand-up comedy shows for the entirety of a feature film. While he has tried his hand at more dramatic fare like Fatherhood, True Story, and The Upside or action roles like Die Hart and The Man From Toronto, Hart consistently returns to comedies. His latest partners him with Mark Wahlberg for yet another production that never rises to the challenge of offering something unique. While Me Time had the potential to deliver a fun, R-rated comedy, it ends up as just another underwhelming paycheck project.

Me Time places Hart in the role of Sonny Fisher, a stay-at-home dad who invests all of his time in his kids and volunteering at their school. Sonny’s wife, Maya (Regina Hall), is a talented architect working with mogul Armando Zavala (Luis Gerardo Mendez). While Sonny spends his time micromanaging his son and daughter, he avoids calls from his childhood best friend Huck Dembo (Mark Wahlberg) whose annual birthday celebrations and bachelor lifestyle deviate from Sonny’s world of lunches and talent shows. When parent Alan Gellar (Andrew Santino) suggests Sonny take some me time during spring break, Maya takes the kids to her parents while Sonny reunites with Huck for his 44th birthday party. It is there that the trailer would have you believe that all hell breaks lose.

Instead, Me Time follows a chaotic mash of various funny sequences into a somewhat nonsensical journey for Sonny to realize what matters most to him. This involves tortoises, upper deckers, strip clubs, left shoes, and keyboards. There are a lot of elements of this movie that don’t really add up despite the movie wanting you to believe that it all makes sense. Me Time feels all over the place and spends a lot of its running time unsure of whether it wants to be a raunchy comedy along the lines of The Hangover or if it wants to be something more family-friendly. There are bright spots in this movie that did make me laugh out loud, but they were few and far between. Taken individually, these scenes play out and work in landing the joke they set out to tell, but as a whole movie, they mostly feel cobbled together and don’t flow very well.

While Kevin Hart has mastered playing this same role, Mark Wahlberg is woefully out of place. As much as I liked Wahlberg opposite Will Ferrell in The Other Guys, his energy here pales in comparison to Hart. An early flashback meant to show how Sonny and Huck used to be such good friends feels very artificial and their relationship for the rest of the movie feels very forced. While both actors do have moments here that show they can be very funny, I felt that this entire movie could have worked better had Wahlberg played the stay-at-home dad yearning for a change in routine while Hart played the aging bachelor who needs to act his age. The scenes where the two actors find a middle ground in their behavior definitely support having them exchange roles because as it stands this just feels like a movie we have seen many times before.

What works well in this movie are the supporting players. Andrew Santino and Luis Gerardo Mendez are hilarious while Jimmy O. Yang is wasted in a minor role as Stan Berman that should have been a more substantial part of the story. There is also a great cameo that factors into the middle of the film that could have also been better used and ends up feeling like a wasted opportunity. Writer and director John Hamburg has experience with balancing talented pairs of actors in comedies like Along Came Polly, I Love You, Man, and Why Him? but never finds a way to take advantage of Wahlberg and Hart at the same time. Most of the minor roles in this movie are far funnier than either of the leads and it is a damn shame since there was potential for this story to have been much better had it found some focus.

Me Time is a prime example of what happens when an actor like Kevin Hart doesn’t stretch himself out of his comfort zone to tackle a story that is genuinely funny. Aside from some scatological jokes and F-bombs, I cannot fathom why this movie is even rated R. Me Time is a perfect Netflix movie because it won’t hurt for you to throw it on if you have nothing else to watch but would have felt like a waste of money had you paid to see it on the big screen. The talent on screen deserved a lot better material and a script that didn’t feel like a half dozen fragments of ideas forced together to fill one hundred minutes of screen time.

Me TIme

BELOW AVERAGE

5