72 Hours Review: Forgettable Kevin Hart Comedy Wastes Its Cast

6 days ago 24

The cast of 72 Hours sitting together at the marina

Though it has some good jokes, especially when letting its stars riff, 72 Hours is poisoned by an uncomfortably bad premise and never recovers.

Published Jul 23, 2026, 9:00 PM EDT

Alex is the Senior Editor of Reviews & Prestige Content, overseeing ScreenRant's film reviews as one of its Rotten Tomatoes-approved critics. After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in English, he spent a locked-down year in Scotland completing a Master's in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh, which he hears is a nice, lively city. He now lives in and works from Milan, Italy, conveniently a short train ride from the Venice Film Festival, which he first covered for SR in 2024.

I've long believed in the power of a premise, but so far, I've mostly thought of it as a positive force. One great idea (and you always know one when you hear it), properly nurtured, can be all the engine a movie needs. But 72 Hours, the new Netflix comedy from director Tim Story and producer-star Kevin Hart, is proof that the opposite is also true. Starting with a bad idea risks poisoning everything that comes after it.

This movie is a generation-gap story about an advertising exec in his 40s who is accidentally added to a group chat full of 20-somethings organizing a bachelor party, which, realizing it's the perfect opportunity to study his most difficult demographic, he decides to attend. On the page, perhaps, this reads as a standard, silly setup for a studio comedy; an excuse to put a bunch of funny people together in an unusual situation. I knew the premise going in, and I didn't give it much thought.

But the moment it's put into action, it becomes unavoidably obvious that this scenario is quite creepy. The film is aware of this and tries to defuse it, but calling attention to it only makes it harder to take any of these characters seriously for having willingly put themselves in this situation. Any chance of buying them as realistic people, and caring about them as such, is already gone. If this was a slasher, I'd be criticizing the filmmakers for being too transparent about setting these characters up as canon fodder.

The movie never really recovers. 72 Hours scores some laughs by virtue of the comedic talent of its cast, but the gonzo plotting feels weightless without anything to really invest in. Add to that the hit-and-miss nature of the jokes, and you get a film that's mostly a wasted opportunity.

With This Cast, 72 Hours Should've Been Much Funnier

When we meet him, Joe (Kevin Hart) seems just one step away from having the life of his dreams. He's up for the Chief Creative Officer job at work, and seemingly first in line for it. He's just moved in with his girlfriend Jennifer (Teyana Taylor – the second peripheral role in a Netflix movie this year for the newly minted Oscar nominee), a beautiful, successful doctor who would seemingly marry him tomorrow if he'd just ask. The only thing standing in his way is his inability to recognize that it's time to get serious; he's not a young, carefree guy anymore.

At work, it's costing him – his last campaigns targeting Gen Z have been painfully out of touch. So, when he's accidentally added by Nick (Marcello Hernández) to the group chat for Mason's (Mason Gooding) bachelor party in Miami, he sees an opportunity to save his promotion. He weasels his way in by offering to fund a much nicer stay, and intends to use the trip as research for a youth-oriented vodka campaign he has just 72 hours to salvage.

In a comedy film, sometimes all it takes to spark something is getting the right people in a scene together, and Hart is clearly trying to team up with a younger generation here. Hernández is a standout of the current Saturday Night Live cast who's only just starting to break into movies, while Scream regular Gooding's star has been steadily rising. Rounding out the bachelor party are Hunter (Ben Marshall) and Freshman (Kam Patterson), bringing two more current SNL cast members into the mix.

The attempts at heartfelt character work, anchored in Gooding's husband-to-be, are ham-fisted...

Multiple times throughout 72 Hours, it feels like Story set up the camera and just let his actors riff, and the hit rate of those moments is pretty good. Patterson gets good mileage out of being the friend group's lovable idiot, while Hernández and Marshall are well-suited to throwing off-the-cuff insults in Hart's direction. I hope to see Hernández get film opportunities with more solid material – he showed the most potential to translate his sketch skill set into something with more of a narrative spine.

This, unfortunately, is not that something. 72 Hours is actually surprisingly plot-heavy, weaving Joe's personal story together with simmering drama in the friend group, increasingly convoluted run-ins with local drug runners, and various other absurdities. The attempts at heartfelt character work, anchored in Gooding's husband-to-be, are ham-fisted, complete with an obvious musical cue anytime he and Joe sit down for a sincere chat. Without an effective throughline, any other sequence depends solely on the quality and execution of its joke.

There are, I admit, some good ones; I enjoyed virtually everything involving the bachelorette party they cross paths with. Some scenes pass by without impact. Others are just plain bad. The filmmakers saw the generational angle of this movie as an excuse to be a little edgy, letting Hart do some off-color bits while his Gen Z co-stars take offense. Aside from that simplified dynamic being tiresome at this point, the jokes themselves commit the cardinal sin of any potentially offensive humor: They're just not very good.

While watching, I was often reminded of Lord and Miller's 21 Jump Street. Story seems to be going for a similar energy here, and the out-there set pieces that work had a chance to be similarly memorable. But it's because 21 Jump Street (admittedly a more successful film in every phase) gets us to care about its characters that I sometimes think back to certain scenes and still find myself chuckling. I doubt I'll ever think about 72 Hours again.

72 Hours is available to stream on Netflix from Friday, July 24.