While Keeping Up With the Joneses had me musing on the career of Zach Galifianakis, I also found myself pondering another comedy career this past weekend when I saw Kevin Hart: What Now? This is the third concert film for the 37-year-old stand-up comic, after 2013’s Laugh at My Pain and 2011’s Let Me Explain. (I’m sad he couldn’t keep the rhyming titles going. Couldn’t he have titled his latest movie What’s on My Brain? Or Raising Cain? Or I Saw That Batman Movie Where I Didn’t Like Bane?) While I was laughing at his jokes, I couldn’t help but wonder why he hasn’t made a good movie yet.
Hart’s stand-up career began with him imitating Chris Tucker, another African-American comic with a high-pitched voice. It didn’t start to take off until he started drawing from his own experiences. Besides the expected jokes about his short stature, he also talked about growing up with a drug-addicted father in Philadelphia. He’s successful now, and he doesn’t hide from it, but neither has he lost touch with his working-class roots the way Eddie Murphy fled his. He has a similar attitude toward his blackness, neither weaponizing it the way Chris Rock has done nor being afraid to use it for material, as in his riff in What Now? about whether his private-school-educated kids are losing their “edge.” His relatability has made him the highest-paid stand-up in comedy today, and when I heard that news, I found myself nodding sagely. As an actor, he has stolen scenes reliably as a supporting player, whether he’s making dirty jokes that pierce the good-mannered facade of Think Like a Man or dancing nimbly between Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone in Grudge Match.
Clearly he has the charm, personality, and comedy chops to carry a film. So why hasn’t it happened? The standard answer is, “He doesn’t know how to choose his scripts.” There’s a certain amount of truth to that, but I think the problem lies deeper for Hart. The Ride Along movies, Get Hard, and Central Intelligence are all basically built on the same premise, pairing up Hart with an alpha male comic actor who’s much taller than him and having them play off each other. His regular-guy stand-up persona has fooled studio executives and perhaps the actor himself into thinking that he’s best as the straight man. This is wrong. While he can react to other people’s hijinks well enough, he’s a catalyst, not a reactor. Just watch The Secret Life of Pets for proof of this, where he provides the voice of a cute bunny rabbit who secretly has plans to take over the world and digs into the character’s ridiculousness and megalomania. He’s so much more lively when he gets to be the guy with weirdo obsessions and elite-level skills at obscure things. He needs to play roles where he cuts loose. Let Hart be Hart!
Another thing he could do is get cozy with better directors. Way back in 2000, Judd Apatow cast him in a recurring role in his one-season collegiate TV sitcom Undeclared. Since then, Hart has buzzed around the fringes of Apatow’s comic universe (This Is the End, The Five-Year Engagement), but a starring vehicle under Apatow or one of his stable of directors would set up Hart better than any of his previous films have done, not to mention providing some racial diversity that Apatowland hasn’t explored yet. As for other directors, couldn’t you imagine Hart crushing the Chris Tucker role from David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook? Wouldn’t he have made that great movie at least 5% better? (Best believe that Hart and fellow proud Philadelphian Bradley Cooper will be pairing up for something at some point. Broad Street Bros?) And somehow the renaissance of African-American filmmaking over the last few years has missed Hart entirely. Surely one of the up-and-comers like Ava DuVernay or Justin Simien or Ryan Coogler could find something for him to do. For all the success that Hart has found on the stand-up circuit, he and we both deserve a movie commensurate with that success.
Also in the Considering series:
Kate Beckinsale
Amanda Seyfried
Taraji P. Henson
Chuck Jones
Song Kang-ho
Keira Knightley
Park Chan-wook
Matthew McConaughey
Bruce Willis
Anna Faris
Kenneth Branagh
