72 Hours

Year 18, Day 243 - 8/31/26 - Movie #5,417

BEFORE: OK, last movie in August, but as I said, the path is now set to go through September and October, so really now we've started the countdown to Halloween. Also, I don't mean to alarm anyone, but there are just 82 movies to Christmas, after tonight. So thematically and cinematically now that "Summer Camp" is over let's try to squeeze in a quick vacation to Florida before the new school year starts. Quickly, here are the format stats for August: 

AUGUST

10 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins, Starring Dick Van Dyke, I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not,  Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, Bruce Springsteen: Born to Rock, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Cracking Up, Mad Money

7 watched on Netflix: Audrey, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan, Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley, Becoming Led Zeppelin, Marty Life Is Short, 72 Hours

4 watched on Amazon Prime: I Am: Celine Dion, John Candy: I Like Me, Reggie, Hoodlum
1 watched on Hulu: Summer Camp

1 watched on Paramount+: Reinventing Elvis: The '68 Comeback

2 watched on HBO MAX: Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, Film Geek
2 watched on a random site: Beyond 'JFK': The Question of Conspiracy, The Ventures: Stars on Guitars

27 TOTAL

I did get to the movies once in August (not counting all the times I worked at the movies) but I won't be able to link to that film for a couple more weeks, so I'm sitting on that review for now. But I think you can probably guess what it was. Andy Garcia carries over from "Hoodlum". 

THE PLOT: A 40-year-old executive ends up at a three-day bachelor party with a group of twenty-somethings after being mistakenly included in their chat group.  

AFTER: Well, jeez, I would usually drop in a chain of four or five Kevin Hart movies without even thinking about it, so I guess we all need to have a talk about our country's rapidly decreasing reserve of Kevin Hart movies. I did watch "Borderlands" earlier in the year, and he made an appearance in the Eddie Murphy doc, but still, it looks like I'm going to just watch this one and move on following the Andy Garcia link, so you know, one in a row where Kevin Hart is concerned, and now I'm very concerned about it. I guess I just watched all of the older ones. He's still going to make the year-end countdown, but something just feels a bit off. 

Still, that's THIS July 24 mentioned on the poster, this is about as fresh a film as fresh gets for me, my reaction time on this is just a little over a month, and that's practically unheard of around here, except I got to see "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" in like the third or fourth week of release, but of course now I'm sitting on that review because it takes time to get there. (Oddly, I could get there from here, but that would screw up the current plan for September and October.)

Today's film is another perfect example of the "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" formula, and, well, there sure are a lot of those. They must all succeed or something for Hollywood to keep going back to this same (general) idea again and again. Most recently seen in "Summer Camp" when a bunch of fifty-something (and I'm being generous here, more likely sixtyish, but they looked pretty good for it) women go back to summer camp and do nothing to avoid activities that would cause them to break a hip. In "72 Hours" an advertising executive who is on the wrong side of 40 realizes his job is in jeopardy because he can't market to the 20-something market without someone in the office calling it "cringe". This is a real thing, what we as a society have unintentionally done is bombard each new generation with more and more advertising, to the point where they're almost immune to it. If you want to reach them you now have to be really sneaky about it, like create a bunch of AI bots that pretend to be real online people who have some kind of gripe against your competition, or you have to create an ad that doesn't look like an ad or get your product into a TV shows that Gen Alpha watches, like one way is to just pay off a show to make sure the main character drives your car, get the car in every scene and then try to just SHUT UP about doing that. 

In this case, Joe Nixon finds himself accidentally part of a text chain between four guys planning a bachelor party weekend in Miami, and then instead of just blocking them or asking them to remove him from the chain he instead makes a donation to their travel fund and then rents them a first-class resort space off some AirBNB-like site, which gets him an invitation to their party weekend. He sees this as an opportunity to get not just insight about their drinking habits and possibly also some undercover video he can build a campaign around, which I think is probably illegal. But these days, who knows? The one thing that he DOESN'T want to happen is to have some 25-year-old at his office get the promotion to CEO, because apparently seniority doesn't mean anything in marketing, it's all about who's got their finger on society's pulse. 

At the same time, Joe's girlfriend of six years is looking for some kind of greater commitment from him, even if it's just to know he's got a long-term plan to stay with her, or move with her if she needs to relocate, and even though marriage is so outdated as a concept, nobody in Hollywood knows how to write for a female character any other way. Women are complicated creatures, sure, but I don't know, maybe take your own advice and get out and talk to a few of them, you know, just to check in to see if they're really as marriage-oriented as their counterparts from 60 years ago were? Because I'm betting that they're not. If anything, as a modern woman I'd say she's eager to get her starter marriage out of the way so she can dump him and find something better long-term, which happens a lot more often than you might think. So we all know he's putting his whole relationship on the line by jetting off to a random bachelor party instead of spending more time with her, but of course he's the only person who can't see that. 

Once he gets to Miami and meets the four bachelor party guys, naturally chaos ensues. The first night out on the party bus there's a lot of drinking and then a lot of puking, mostly from Joe. (Tell me you're trying to be the male "Bridesmaids" without telling me you're trying to be the male "Bridesmaids")  This leads the five guys to a laundromat in the shady part of Miami (umm, it's all shady, right?) where they are mistaken for four young male prostitutes and their older pimp. Joe manages to outrun a lady cop and also somehow ends up with her badge. 

Second try, Joe tries to rent them a yacht on Saturday to make up for their disastrous Friday night. But there's a mix-up at the boatyard and all the yachts are rented (??) so Joe uses the badge to impersonate an undercover officer and gets them all aboard a giant super-yacht where a drug lord's lavish party is being held. Joe is forced to take cocaine to prove that he's NOT a cop, and this brings out his alter ego, Ricardo Montana, who's straight out of "Scarface". Ricardo is an expert fighter somehow, and naturally manages to piss off the drug kingpin (who happens to be the son of the drug-lord who owns the AirBnB property, and Joe is already on their radar for breaking into a bedroom closet there because he needed funky clothes to wear to parties).

It's a stretch, sure, and then believability is stretched further when there's a theft of millions of dollars of cocaine that took place at the exact same time as the party, and "Ricardo Montana" is blamed for it. Who is this new player on the Miami drug distribution scene? And how did he disappear so quickly? After a run-in with a group of women who pretend to be a bachelorette party and instead drug men to steal their wallets and strand them on an island, our bachelor party group learns that Mason, the groom, has been kidnapped by the drug-lord who wants Ricardo Montana to give him back his drugs. Joe is forced - FORCED - to take another insane amount of drugs to turn back into the only unreal part of him that can get them out of this pickle. 

Well, sure, it's not exactly Shakespeare - and any screenwriter who needs to create a split personality based on drug use to solve the narrative at hand is really just creating a new problem to solve the old one, and most likely you might feel that there probably should have been a better way to resolve everything. "No, honey, I just HAD to take all the drugs, there wasn't any other way to save Mason's life..."  Yeah, that's not gonna fly. Oh, I wish I could say that the weird problems ended there, but no, there's a guy smuggling whale organs and a disfiguring jellyfish sting to deal with, and many other issues. Really, between "Bridesmaids" and "The Hangover" and "Bachelorette" and "Girls Trip", to name just a few, we shouldn't be surprised that each new film is trying to out-do the others, and I think we're accidentally creating a society that's against marriage because everyone's afraid of what might happen before the wedding, and then we've got films like "You're Cordially Invited" and "Bride Wars" and "You Again" waiting in the wings. It's probably best to stay single as long as you can, or at least that's the mentality we're feeding into. Go ahead, trace it all the way back to "Bachelor Party", I dare you.

Directed by Tim Story (director of "Ride Along" and "Ride Along 2")

Also starring Kevin Hart (last seen in "Being Eddie"), Marcello Hernandez (last seen in "Lorne"), Mason Gooding (last seen in "Scream VI"), Kam Patterson, Ben Marshall (also last seen in "Lorne"), Zach Cherry (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), Michael Mando (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Teyana Taylor (last seen in "The Rip"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Anna Garcia (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Elysée Sanvillé, Geena Quintos, Megan Suri (last seen in "Valentine's Day"), Brandon Dial, Amy Keum, Amenah, John Edward Miller, Ava Eisenson (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Katt Williams (last seen in "Father Figures"), Brandon JonesMooney, Mike Epps (last seen in "Madame Web"), Sophia Del Rio, Alana Morrison, Don Lee, Will "Spank" Horton (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Maggie Medford, Elexis Lewis, Scott Adsit (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Rodd Cyrus, Sammy Krieger, Anna Greenberg, Ryan Quigley, Hannah Masi, LeRoyal Tutt, Tony Zuccaro, Eladio Carrion, Stormi Maya (last seen in "Hustlers")

RATING: 5 out of 10 bottles of Unlimited vodka in a suitcase (nope, no red flags there.)