A film review by Craig J. Koban September 4, 2022

ME TIME ½

2022, R, 101 mins.

Kevin Hart as Sonny  /  Mark Wahlberg as Huck  /  Regina Hall as Maya  /  Rah Mowry as Kabir  /  Jimmy O. Yang as Stan  /  Carlo Rota as Alberto   /  Luis Gerardo Méndez  as Armando  /  Melanie Minichino as Azul

ORIGINAL FILM

ME TIME is a very special kind of film. 

Within its first three minutes we get a would-be hysterical gag involving star Kevin Hart slipping on a piece of turtle crap and falling flat on his back.   

Three minutes later...the very same gag happens again.   

It was at this vantage point that I truly felt that this film was serving up multiple warning signs of what was to come over the course of the next 90-plus minutes.   

Calling this Netflix produced effort a "comedy" is almost a Herculean stretch.  ME TIME is a hopeless black hole where laughs get sucked in to die.  The film's title is highly fitting: I felt like I needed some me-time to recover from the endurance test of will that was watching ME TIME.  What starts off as a potentially interesting exploration of stay-at-home fathers depressingly segues into an obnoxiously unfunny comedy replete with gross out gags galore and Hart once again doing his audience placating, paycheck grabbing schtick.  What's really shocking here is that ME TIME is from director John Hamburg, who previously co-wrote some of the most memorable comedies of their era in MEET THE PARENTS and ZOOLANDER and directed the underrated ALONG CAME POLLY and I LOVE YOU MAN.  You can sense what's buried deep beneath this film in terms of what it's aiming to be as a tale about friendships, parenthood and a modern day take on MR. MOM, but the whole enterprise is so creatively bankrupt, so unpleasant, so dim-witted, and so punishingly lacking in genuine merriment that it's baffling to contemplate.  ME TIME makes THE MAN FROM TORONTO (another Kevin Hart Netflix film - an action comedy) look like an Oscar frontrunner by comparison. 

Hart plays the aforementioned stay-at-home dad Sonny, who's introduced in a sensationally awful opening sequence set decades in the past and shows him and his BFF in Huck (an equally slumming it Mark Wahlberg) enjoying the high life in their 20s and engaging in some death-defying cliff diving for the latter's birthday (the VFX compositing is so rough here that you never once believe that any of the actors here were on a cliff, let alone outdoors).  The story then flashes forward to the present and we see Sonny much more settled down into his family domestic duties.  His extremely successful architect wife in Maya (Regina Hall) is the main breadwinner for him and their kids.  She's a loving wife and a good provider for Sonny, but lately she has been feeling like she's taking her time with her family for granted and is simply away too much in trying to brokerage a major deal with eco billionaire Armando (Luis Gerardo Mendez), which she hopes will breach out into her starting her own company.  The easy-going Sonny is fairly content with his family's status quo and doesn't seem too interested in anything uprooting it. 

But between home duties and dealing with all of his children's school endeavors, Sonny is starting to feel a tad overwhelmed, and swooping in for the emotional rescue is his old pal in Huck that contacts Sonny in an effort to get him to come away to help him celebrate his 44th birthday.  Sonny is initially lukewarm to the idea, but when Maya offers to take the kids away herself for spring break she also further offers Sonny something that he hasn't had in an awfully long time: some much needed me-time.  Sonny is given a full week of doing whatever he wants, which eventually culminates with him joining the ridiculously large and expensive party that Huck is orchestrating.  Unfortunately for both bosom buddies, reality takes a hard swing at both of them with the appearance of a loan shark (Jimmy O. Yang) that shows up unannounced and demands that Huck pay up on some large and avoided debts that he owes.  While this is happening, Sonny is growing concerned with the amount of time that his wife is spending with Armando to smooth him over, leaving him bitterly jealous.  Sitcom worthy hijinks of the most annoyingly contrived manner ensue. 

There are just two good things that I'll say about ME TIME.  Firstly, it's so very rare to have a comedy lately that features a well off family unit with the woman being the sole provider and the man being the homemaker.  Secondly, the film deserves some credit for not easily making Maya a cruelly unsympathetic career-aholic that doesn't care about Sonny's struggles at home, but at the same time he's not portrayed as a going out of his mind homebody.  He genuinely seems to like being a stay-at-home father and takes great pride in all of the inherent challenges therein.  He knows that Maya is the earner of the family, and he's a nurturing partner to her in this regard.  We just don't get to see family and gender dynamics play out in mainstream comedies as on display in ME TIME, so for as far as being somewhat progressive minded with the material the film deserves some modest praise.  Both parents are responsible minded in their respective roles in the household and neither experiences any deeply internalized guilt as a result of their duties.  That's nice to see a comedy swap the typically assigned gender roles and respect it.   

Where ME TIME is a categorical failure, though, is in the comedy department, or lack thereof, which only serves to derail the good elements outlined above.  One of the most fundamentally painful aspects of Hamburg's film is how badly it fumbles the ball and good will of its basic premise involving these parents and instead descends Sonny deep into a cornucopia of uninspired subplots and puerile gags that seem haphazardly inserted in for shock value.  ME TIME has so much promise to fully chronicle Sonny as a character and respect his role within his unique family unit, but as soon as Maya gives him a one-week hall pass, so to speak, we get a dreadfully unfunny montage of him embarking on (checks notes) masturbating to pornography in his bedroom, playing golf with much more highly skilled elderly women, and frequent visits to BBQ joints to gorge himself silly.  Then the film careens towards the larger story arc of Huck, his massive Bday bash (dubbed Huckchella), and the terrible aftermath.  This builds to a would-be uproarious scene involving poor Sonny running for his life from a salivating and horribly rendered CG mountain lion (I saw this right after the fairly superb BEAST that also had CG lions attacking people, so watching Hart scream his way off of this wretched computer creation might be the comedic low bar of 2022).  If this were not enough, Huck and Sonny then engage in a plan that seems ripped off from the Norm Macdonald comedy DIRTY WORK by venturing to Armando's mansion to trash it.  We get to see Sonny taking a shit (albeit small) on the rich man's bed, which seems like spiritual payback for slipping on turtle shit not once, but twice early on in the film.  I literally wanted to shut my stream off for good at this point, curl up into a ball on my sofa, and contemplate the mistake I made in hitting play.