Getting older can’t be easy for a famous and beloved high-energy comedian. That seems especially true for a self-consciously grindset-addicted figure like Kevin Hart, whose self-image obviously depends on keeping peak-level busy without stopping to consider whether he’s ever made a good movie. (There have been some, though less when you discount supporting roles and cameos.) Hart’s new movie 72 Hours attempts to attack that challenge head-on; he plays Joe, an ad exec in danger of being passed over for a promotion because his proposed campaign for a vodka brand is out of touch with younger demographics. So when he’s accidentally added to a groupchat of a bunch of Gen-Z twentysomethings planning a wild (if cash-impaired) bachelor party in Miami, he impulsively decides to roll with it and spend a three-day weekend on what amounts to a sort of mobile, intensive focus group. The quartet of young besties are a little weirded out, but when Joe promises to bankroll and upgrade their partying, they decide to roll with it, too.
Even when making Hart the butt of chopped-unc jokes, though, there’s plenty of ego preservation for the unabashed star-producer, starting with the way 72 Hours shaves a full seven years off of Hart’s actual age, repeatedly describing him as a 40-year-old. This isn’t the most egregious age-fudge in Hollywood history, but it’s enough to nudge him from a later-period Gen-Xer to a solid millennial. If this was done to exacerbate a pointed millennial/Gen-Z divide, that would be fair enough. But Hart reads so stubbornly as Gen-X that the movie doesn’t dare push into more specific references one way or the other.
For that matter, the movie’s take on Gen-Z is wobbly at best; the best that can be said is that it’s not particularly derisive so much as blandly lacking in opinion, a trademark move for Hart’s longtime collaborator Tim Story, who does his usual brand of semi-slick barely-directing. At one point after logging some time with the guys, Joe puzzles over this generation’s seeming contradictions: Are they terminally online or highly wary of social-media fry? This is a way of lampshading the movie’s wishy-washy portrait of twentysomethings who are simultaneously voracious pleasure-seekers, judgmental of their uncool elders, and far more in touch with their feelings than past generations.
72 Hours has plenty of opportunities to distinguish these points of view, with the twentysomething group composed of Nick (Marcello Hernández), the wild one; Hunter (Ben Marshall), the more cautious one still smarting from a breakup; Freshman (Kam Patterson), the seemingly dumb one, so nicknamed due to repeating his freshman year; and Mason (Mason Gooding), the well-adjusted one who’s actually getting married, much to Nick’s aggressive chagrin. Mostly, though, the movie is a striking portrait of how three guys who routinely work 18-hour days together— Hernández, Marshall, and Patterson are all currently Saturday Night Live cast members—nonetheless have trouble creating the impression that they’re close friends, let alone lifelong ride-or-dies.
It all feeds into the sense that 72 Hours is a half-baked, mystifying conceit masquerading as a high concept; the core idea of an older guy desperate to keep up with today’s young people is a fertile one, but little of it makes much sense in practice. Most of the supposed generation gap gets channeled into gags that are alternately tired formats (runs of “you look like” jokes), overplayed concepts (Joe does cocaine against his will), or the occasional deadly running bit that you can tell Hart and the filmmakers thought was a gold mine. Per the latter, when Joe does the aforementioned cocaine, he launches into an extended and terrible Tony Montana-style persona, which he brings back later in the movie, preceding a labored discussion of how offensive the routine is, a meta touch that only serves to distend the routine further. Oh, and if Hart doing bad accents, pretending to be 40, and delivering sage life advice wasn’t self-indulgent enough, at one point his character gets into a slapstick brawl with his former real-life nemesis Katt Williams. Is this film Kevin Hart fan service?!
With five comic actors at the center spouting off silly reactions and some presumed ad-libs, 72 Hours almost can’t help but land some stray, scattershot laughs. There’s some funny material with a gaggle of nefarious party girls preying on dumb bros; that ensuing slapstick brawl actually has some life to it. But any time 72 Hours threatens to launch into full-blown mayhem, Story and Hart throttle the momentum. They have the misguided instinct to ground their movie emotionally while failing to elicit a single moment that feels remotely honest, whether it’s Joe’s coworker informing him that his surreptitious videos of twentysomethings drinking vodka is somehow revelatory, or Hart’s scenes with his inexplicable love interest Jen (Teyana Taylor, who seems to be acting elsewhere, in a mournful soap opera). As is usually the case in his romantic scenes, Hart feels like he’s giving the object of his affection a neverending sales pitch. Actually, that applies to most of his scenes in general; he’s long since lost the distinction between selling an audience on his comedy and making them laugh.
Director: Tim Story
Writers: Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, Kevin Burrows, Matt Mider
Starring: Kevin Hart, Marcello Hernández, Ben Marshall, Mason Gooding, Kam Patterson, Teyana Taylor
Release Date: July 24, 2026 (Netflix)
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