2.5 stars (out of 5)
Dwayne Johnson (a big star around the world) and Kevin Hart (a big star in America) surely looked like a match made in Hollywood Heaven, and yet co-writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s action comedy winds up a ludicrous cheese-fest, although man-mountain Dwayne brings some goofy charm to proceedings – even if Kevin doesn’t.
The flashback-to-1996 opening sequence is featured in the trailer: chubby Bobby Weirdicht (played by Sione Kelepi with some FX?) is a bullied sort grabbed from the showers and thrown naked into a school assembly by a bunch of nasties, and only cool dude Calvin Joyner helps him. 20 years later, Calvin has properly turned into Kevin Hart and feels unfulfilled in his accountant job, and while trying to get out of attending a school reunion with missus Maggie (Danielle Nicolet), he somehow befriends ‘Bob Stone’ on Facebook and discovers that it’s actually Bobby, who’s now improbably grown up to be Dwayne.
Bob has other secrets too, and as they’re in the trailer they can also be given away here, as Calvin discovers that the desperate-to-be-chummy Bob is maybe a rogue CIA agent wanted by a mob of suits and perhaps willing to sell codes (or something) to baddies headed by ‘The Black Badger’ (not exactly the coolest villain’s name, but anyway). Calvin understandably doesn’t trust Bob, and the pair is soon having all sorts of ridiculous escapades which would kill lesser men, or at least get them locked up, whether they actually catch the bloody Badger or not.
Trying for the biggest audience possible by keeping the violence and rudeness low (unlike Thurber’s We’re The Millers), which means that thousands of bullets are fired but no one really gets hurt, this is again notable for Johnson’s smiley charisma and Hart’s conspicuous stealing of his whole shrieking persona from Chris Tucker (star of those Rush Hour movies). Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!
I Wake Up Screening 