Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart find comedy where Rob Schneider couldn’t in Get Hard

2014 was a great year for Kevin Hart: his films Ride Along, Think Like A Man Too, and About Last Night were all box office successes (with varying degrees of appreciation from critics), and Hart appeared in the fairly well received Top Five. As the world looks to the future, it looks to Hart as Darnell Lewis, a guy who has never been to prison but is nonetheless asked to help wealthy businessman James King (Will Ferrell) prepare to serve jail time for fraud. It’s funny because Ferrell assumes Hart knows about jail because he’s black, and because a rich white guy actually gets sent to jail for something. To be fair, Get Hard follows in a long, unfortunate tradition of films where white guys learn how to act “street” that includes such comedic greats as Steve Martin in Bringing Down The House, DJ Qualls in The New Guy, and Rob Schneider in Big Stan. But who knows? Perhaps there‘s fresh material to be mined out of fear of rape or white guys dressing in loud colors. As always, we remain cautiously optimistic.