About Last Night (2014)

The 2014 About Last Night arrives as a remake of a 1986 film, which itself drew from David Mamet's 1974 play Sexual Perversity in Chicago. The update relocates the action from Chicago to Los Angeles and recasts the four central lovers, previously white, with Kevin Hart, Michael Ealy, Regina Hall, and Joy Bryant. That decision is the film's one act of cultural repositioning, and it is executed with a shrug. The movie does not interrogate the choice, dramatize it, or build a thesis around it. It casts four Black actors and lets them be funny and miserable in the usual ways.

What follows is a standard romantic comedy of the two-couple variety. Bernie and Joan bicker with theatrical hostility. Danny and Debbie move in together and then fracture. The script moves briskly, the dialogue has snap, and the supporting architecture of bars, offices, and New Year's Eve parties is assembled from parts we have seen before. No sermon interrupts the proceedings. Nobody lectures about gender, or power, or the economy. The film's ambitions are romantic and comic, and it meets them. Hart and Hall carry the comic load with timing the material rewards.

The seriousness of the enterprise is limited to craft. This is a picture about adults behaving badly and then, cautiously, better. It offers no argument about the world and seems content to offer none. A sommelier would note the absence of tannin. The vintage is pleasant, uncomplicated, and gone by morning.