Pinning down what exactly went wrong with this no-brainer buddy comedy starring Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart is difficult. Beginning in 1996, the lives of two high school seniors, Calvin “The Golden Jet” Joyner (Hart) and overweight Robbie Weirdicht (Johnson), are intertwined by an act of kindness in the face of immense bullying. Twenty years later, on the eve of their high school reunion, Calvin and Robbie, now Bob Stone, meet up for beers. The next day, Calvin finds himself on the run from the CIA, led by Agent Harris (Amy Ryan), as Bob might not be on the up and up.
The prospect of teaming the muscled, magnetic Johnson and the hyper, hilarious Hart together should be an easy winner, but something must have gone awry on the way from page to screen. It is hard to imagine a script co-written by Ike Barinholtz—a standout in everything in which he appears, from “The Mindy Project” to Neighbors—lacking laughter. Nevertheless, Johnson and Hart have survived weak scripts before. Too bad the former Rock doubles down on Bob’s eccentricity and ends up a cartoon, while Hart has played this same semi-straight man too recently in Ride Along 2.
Director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who showed a few smart comic instincts in Dodgeball, cannot mesh the action with comedy. At its worst, Central Intelligence cannot save its poorly shot action with the laughs one expects from these stars. Nevertheless, I would take another chance on this duo based on their chemistry alone, which delivers the bare minimum of laughs required to retain the genre designation of comedy.
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