Night School

Maybe Night School might slide past more easily in the summer, when audiences are more susceptible to silly comedies. But it is possible even summer audiences would find this a disappointingly lesser work from two of the most unquenchably funny people in movies, Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish. It’s a warning sign when the opening credits show six different writers in a tangle of “ands” and “&s,.” The seams between the obvious rewrites trip over each other, interrupting the flow of the storyline and the build-up of the comedy.

The premise is in the title and the best jokes are all in the trailer. Kevin Hart plays Teddy, a high school dropout who is happy and successful, happy because he has a beautiful, accomplished, loving girlfriend (the exquisitely lovely Megalyn Echikunwoke as Lisa), but not as successful as she thinks he is because he does not want her to know that he never finished high school and is living paycheck to paycheck. His best friend Marv (Ben Schwartz) warns him that he cannot afford his duplex, Porsche, or the engagement ring he wants to give Lisa, but Teddy’s boss has promised to give him the store when he retires, and so he thinks it will all work out.

Of course, all of that has to fall apart for the story to happen, but it takes too long to get to the reason we are there — night school, so Teddy can get his GED and go to work for Marv as a financial analyst(!). And so we can see the scenes with Hart and Haddish, playing his teacher, Carrie. The early scenes drag, especially when Teddy tries to get out of paying an expensive restaurant bill by sticking his hand down his pants so he can put some hair into the food and claim it came that way from the kitchen. And then Teddy has to accidentally burn down the store, another pointless, overlong digression.

And then we get to the GED program, at the very high school that was so traumatic for Teddy, now run by his high school nemesis, Stewart (a woefully underused Taran Killam), who has a poster of “Lean on Me” behind his desk and carries a Joe Clark-style baseball bat to terrorize the students.

The night school instructor is Carrie (Haddish), a straight-talking, hard-working teacher who demands the best from students. She has no patience for the work-arounds Teddy has come up with to hide what she recognizes as learning disabilities. But she has all the patience it takes to find a way for him to succeed.

The night school classmates are lazily sketched out, relying on our familiarity with the types we have seen in so many movie classrooms and the talent of the supporting cast, including Rob Riggle playing the blustery part he usually plays, Mary Lynn Rajskub in another mousy role, and Al Madrigal as the waiter Teddy got fired in the restaurant incident. The movie heaves from one set-up to the next, and we get the sense that “Kevin does something funny” is pretty much all they had in mind for most of them. Ultimately, even that fails and they have to resort to the desperation go-to, a dance sequence. To Outkast’s “Hey-Ya.” Come on. Okay, that part made me smile, but I was not proud of myself for it.

We don’t need the movie to make sense or ring true, but we do need it not to fight with us. In other words, the events and the comedy have to bring the movie forward. It may be funny to see Haddish deliver a powerhouse punch to Hart in full boxing gear (followed by further punches as he gets more and more protective covering), but it undermines everything we have been told about her character’s dedication and decency and come on, this is how you “cure” ADD and dyslexia? Scenes like the whole class getting together to steal the answers to a test go on much too long for too little payoff. I’m a fan of director Malcolm Lee, whose films generally have an expert balance of heart and humor. This one, sorry to say, does not make the grade.

Parents should know that this film includes near-R-level language and crude humor, sexual references, comic peril and violence, and drug references.

Family discussion: How did understanding that he had learning disabilities change Teddy’s outlook? Why didn’t he tell Lisa the truth sooner?

If you like this, try: “Central Intelligence” and “Girls Trip”