Me Time (2022)

Me Time arrives as a Netflix buddy comedy in which Kevin Hart plays a stay-at-home dad who, with his family away, reconnects with his hard-partying old friend, played by Mark Wahlberg, for a birthday weekend that escalates into desert foraging, a loan shark, and a house-wrecking rager. John Hamburg wrote and directed. The critics were unkind, and the aggregate scores suggest a film that will be remembered chiefly as a scheduling entry in the filmographies of its two stars.

The picture assembles a genuinely diverse ensemble. Black leads anchor the story, with Latino and Asian performers in supporting roles, and the film treats this as unremarkable, which is to its credit and also the outer limit of its ambitions on that front. Nothing in the script engages race as a subject. There are no LGBTQ characters or themes. The desert sequence, in which the group forages for communal meals among yurts, gestures at nothing environmental. The loan shark who arrives to collect forty-seven thousand dollars is a plot mechanism, not a parable about capital. Regina Hall's Maya has a career and a wealthy client, and the film never bothers to make an argument about it. Even the projectile vomiting is staged for pure slapstick, with no interest in what bodies are supposed to look like.

Where the film does reach for meaning, in its final act, it lands on a gentle homily about presence and the perils of overcontrolling fatherhood. Sonny apologizes, the talent show is opened to all comers, and a party planning business is founded. The sentiment is warm and forgettable, the sort of moral that family comedies have distributed for decades without anyone mistaking it for a sermon. We are left with a competent piece of streaming content that achieves its diversity through casting and its message by accident. It is not angry. It is not instructive. It is simply there, and then it is over.