Toning down his motormouthed shtick for the first act, Hart stars as Calvin Joyner, a meek accountant who used to be the coolest and most popular kid at Central High. Anxious about his upcoming high-school reunion, Calvin gets an out-of-the-blue Facebook message from Robbie Weirdicht, the overweight class laughing stock he hasn’t seen in 20 years. Weirdicht (Johnson), now known as “Bob Stone,” has grown up to be a rogue CIA super-agent, though he still idolizes Calvin for being the only kid at school who was ever kind to him. Through a series of a head-scratching plot holes, he ropes Calvin into a plan to evade his former boss (Amy Ryan, looking lost), clear his name, and discover the identity of an arms trafficker named The Black Badger—all in time for the aforementioned reunion, of course.
As in Thurber’s last movie, We’re The Millers, there are hints of a much darker (and better) comedy buried throughout; a throwaway moment even suggests that Bob—who rides around on the same motorcycle Calvin had in school—might be manipulating the former prom king’s over-inflated sense of his teenage glory days for his own gain. But instead of pursuing that angle, Central Intelligence opts for everybody-learns-a-life-lesson schmaltz and the kind of listless, feature-length-gag-reel vamping that’s become a common viewer hazard ever since Hollywood convinced itself that anyone can direct improv. The cast’s energy level jumps from shot to shot, and once the chases and stunts (both pretty bad) start, Hart starts veering randomly from fidgety, button-down everyman to a heartbeat away from shouting “Laaady!” in his shrillest Jerry Lewis voice.
Aside from an uncredited Jason Bateman, who gets a smarmy bit role as Bob’s childhood bully, nobody seems to be playing a consistent character. Given that the movie’s bungled, sporadic plotting ends up making less sense than a Now You See Me movie, that’s a minor problem. (Plus, Johnson’s beaming confidence works whether he’s playing Bob as a globetrotting badass in awe of his own cool or a muscled superman with the mind and fashion sense of a painfully awkward teen.) But even when the actors manage to get on the same page, they still risk being disrupted by Thurber’s careless and occasionally perplexing direction and pacing. He even manages to mess up a surefire “20 years later” gag by inserting an inexplicably long opening title card sequence that looks like it was made for a community-college motion graphics class.
