Night School (2018)

NIGHT SCHOOL (2018) One star

I know that I am probably not the target audience for director Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy starring Kevin Hart, who also served as one of the six writers and producers on NIGHT SCHOOL.

I know that, but I am still hard pressed to come up with a single (even fleeting) moment I laughed at during a movie listed at 111 minutes.

I struggled through NIGHT SCHOOL, but I must report there were those around me who laughed their heads off at regular intervals. They made up the difference for my stone face. (Previously, I had this experience at THE HANGOVER, STEP BROTHERS, and TED, though far more pronounced for those comedies since I watched them in a crowded multiplex.)

Perusing through Hart’s credits, I found one movie over the last 18 years that I watched before experiencing NIGHT SCHOOL, just one movie and not exactly a good one at that, SCARY MOVIE 3. I might have watched SUPERHERO MOVIE, but it’s not exactly coming back to me now with any clarity. I am glad that I have missed just about every one of his movies.

In NIGHT SCHOOL, Hart plays a high school dropout named Teddy who’s forced to attend night school at his alma mater to pursue a GED. It is far more complicated than that, of course, especially since he’s not been honest with his far more successful fiance about a single thing. Yes, he’s a hustler. I know, I know, it’s a shocker.

I especially found any of the restaurant scenes in NIGHT SCHOOL difficult to watch, because they involve a pubic hair custody battle, incessant mugging and melodrama especially by Hart, racism accusations that will remind one of bad scenes from BEVERLY HILLS COP and RUSH HOUR 2 involving Eddie Murphy and Chris Tucker, and I just can’t take that sentence and paragraph any longer though I will be leaving behind crucial plot points.

The classroom scenes are really not any better, since the night school students and authority figures combine to form a modern-day comedic variation on a platoon in a World War II movie. There are would-be identification figures for everybody in NIGHT SCHOOL.

We have the harpy teacher with an inspirational heart of gold (Tiffany Haddish), the high school principal (Taran Killam) whom our protagonist embarrassed back in high school who’s prone to fits of mugging for the camera more pronounced than the rest of the cast, the working class laborer (Rob Riggle) who has literally broken his back and wants to get into management, the harried housewife (Mary Lynn Rajskub) with a great big lummox for a husband, the former waiter (Al Madrigal) who dreams of being like Justin Bieber or Justin Timberlake, the woke conspiracy theorist (Romany Malco), the young woman (Anne Winters) from a wealthy family, and the convict (Fat Joe) beamed into a standard plot through Skype.

Hart, Haddish, and Killam in particular are guilty of overplaying everything, bludgeoning us with every single joke until the film gets all gooey and sentimental in the final reel and takes its plot oh so seriously. This cast acts like each audience member suffers from a learning disability (or hearing loss).

I absolutely hate it when comedies go for cheap gag after cheap gag for most of their running time and then get all serious and borderline preachy at the end, like they want both their NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE and their ABC Afterschool Special. I wanted to gag when Teddy began his meandering feel good speech at graduation.

Austin Chronicle reviewer Marc Savlov incorporated both the Hindenburg and John Hughes’ THE BREAKFAST CLUB into his opening sentence. That’s good and true, because NIGHT SCHOOL indeed leaves me saying “Oh, the Humanity!”