The awful Kevin Hart comedy climbing the Netflix charts
Netflix has gotten into the Kevin Hart business in a major way since signing a lucrative first-look development deal with the diminutive comedian and actor, which makes it ironic that it’s a movie he made before he inked a deal with the streaming service that’s cracked the top ten.
Since first putting pen to paper on their multi-year agreement, Netflix’s executives have done their best to make Hart’s presence as ubiquitous as possible. The platform purchased Fatherhood from Sony during the height of the pandemic, a shrewd move that saw it become one of the streamer’s most-watched original films ever.
He went semi-series starring opposite Wesley Snipes in the limited series True Story, teamed up with Woody Harrelson for the awful buddy caper The Man from Toronto, somehow conspired to make an even worse picture when he sparred with Mark Wahlberg in Me Time, and headlined entirely forgettable crime caper Lift.
That’s without even mentioning the six-part documentary series Don’t F**k This Up, the variety special Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History, or his role as the host of The Roast of Tom Brady. Everywhere Netflix subscribers look, Hart seems to be there, so it makes perfect sense for a credit from his back catalogue to waste little time in capturing the attention of users worldwide.
Malcolm D Lee’s comedy Night School comfortably cleared $100million at the global box office following its theatrical release in September 2018, with Hart and Tiffany Haddish playing a beleaguered salesman and his former high school nemesis, respectively. When the former accidentally blows up his workplace, he needs the requisite educational qualifications to get back into the world of work, which leads him towards the titular evening classes.
Hart and Haddish are popular performers with strong comedic backgrounds, but Night School is about as formulaic as they come. The gags are signposted from a mile away, the story hits every single one of the beats the plot would suggest, and the inevitable and unavoidable lessons everyone is expecting the characters to learn are indeed learned along the way.
It’s basically a feature-length sitcom episode, which makes it apt that a TV series spun off from the movie was once in development before being scrapped. Clearly, nobody wanted to live through Night School more than once, apart from the Netflix viewers who’ve conspired to see it debut as the seventh top-viewed film on the global charts since being added to the content library.