A new trailer for Kevin Hart’s latest, Get Hard (get it?), has hit the Internet, and promises to show the same subtle finesse and fresh, forward-thinking attitude towards racial issues and the prison-industrial complex as The Wedding Ringer brought to traditional gender roles. (Both films appear to be big on the gay jokes.)
Hart’s bumbling foil in this particular film is Will Ferrell as James King, a wealthy businessman convicted of fraud and sentenced to hard (GET IT?) time at San Quentin. Terrified that he’s going to get raped in prison—a vein of comedic potential that this film appears to have thoroughly strip mined—King asks car wash employee Darnell Lewis (Hart) to help him prepare for prison. The idea that King assumes that Lewis has been to jail because he’s black, and that Lewis is quite willing to exploit this assumption for cash, is interesting, but Get Hard’s repertoire of joke topics is so cliché that it’s tiresome even in trailer form. But if you’re a Kevin Hart completist or are writing your thesis on Will Ferrell’s post-Land Of The Lost filmography or something, Get Hard hits theaters on March 27.