Click on image to see it full-size.

Kevin Hart has become a bankable comedy star, sometimes releasing multiple movies a year. His newest is NIGHT SCHOOL, in which Hart plays Teddy Walker, a highly successful barbecue grill salesman (with a wealthy and beautiful girlfriend) who finds himself suddenly out of a job. Thanks to his learning issues in high school, Teddy is now in a position where in order to get another promising career, he must first go back to school and get his GED. So he returns to the high school he never finished, only to find an old rival named Stewart (Taran Killam) is now the principal, and the night school teacher Carrie (Tiffany Haddish) isn’t the kind to suffer fools lightly. He joins an evening class of misfits who must learn to accept each other and take their studies seriously if they hope to succeed, with Teddy having the added challenge of Stewart purposely trying to hold him back.

We’ve seen these types of comedies before, whether it be BACK TO SCHOOL, BILLY MADISON, or OLD SCHOOL… there’s something inherently fun about the idea of a middle-aged guy going back to a teenage-geared education, at least usually there is. But NIGHT SCHOOL feels a little too formulaic and watered down to ever make much of an impression. The cast is doing the best they can with the material, with great supporting players like Rob Riggle, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Romany Malco, Al Madrigal and Anne Winters making the classmates a great mix of comedic fun. Kevin Hart does his best to make Teddy a likable if flawed hero for the piece, while Tiffany Haddish shines brightest as the tough as nails Carrie, the kind of teacher you respect but also fear just enough to take seriously. It’s honestly one of Haddish’s more subdued performances in recent memory, and she does manage to find some nice chemistry with Hart. Taran Killam also finds funny beats as the stuffy principal and childhood villain of Teddy, getting strong laughs when he slips into his “black voice” trying to sound tough. Everyone is doing admirable work, it just never seems to elevate the material past the point of satisfactory levels. It’s also obvious this was at one point an R-rated comedy, as you can see a few moments where dialogue was dubbed over to be more “safe”, making us wonder if this might have worked better had it been a little more raw.

NIGHT SCHOOL is directed by Malcolm D. Lee, who previously helped make Haddish a star with the highly successful GIRLS TRIP, but even he can’t find anything to make the production special or outstanding outside of a few undeniable laughs – it should be noted, there are SIX names credited on the writing side of things here, including Kevin Hart, so this may be a case where they found the concept easily but just couldn’t figure out how to do anything great with it. As Kevin Hart comedies go, this is not one of his better efforts, though not a bad distraction if you’re looking for a fun PG-13 comedy to kill a few hours with… and speaking of a few hours, that may be part of the problem as the film runs almost two hours in length, and almost certainly could have benefit from a bit more editing. NIGHT SCHOOL isn’t a bad movie, it’s just far from great, though somewhere in its conception it might have been.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•