Night School (2018)

Night School arrives as a mainstream studio comedy with a predominantly Black ensemble, a fact the film treats as unremarkable, which is both to its credit and the whole of its ambition on that front. Kevin Hart plays Teddy Walker, a grill salesman whose career detonates along with a gas tank, sending him back to a night school classroom to earn the GED he abandoned seventeen years earlier. Tiffany Haddish teaches him. The pairing should produce more sparks than it does. The commitment to a majority Black cast in a broad Universal comedy is a genuine mainstreaming gesture, unstated and uncelebrated. The film never turns that casting into an argument, and it never turns it into a joke. It simply is. There is quiet progress in that, and also a quiet nothing.

The engine of the plot, once the slapstick settles, is Teddy's diagnosis of dyslexia, dyscalculia, and assorted processing issues, a revelation handled with an earnestness that edges toward public service announcement. Learning disabilities are named, tested, and destigmatized in sequence, and the film is at its most sincere when it is explaining them. Elsewhere the social consciousness thins out. A classmate loses a factory job to a robot, a glancing nod toward economic displacement that the screenplay declines to pursue. Haddish's teacher is competent and assertive, and a classmate is a single mother of several children, but the film mines both for laughs and moves along. No environmental themes surface. No LGBTQ characters surface. No body positivity messaging surfaces. The historical record is left undisturbed.

A moral arrives gently in the final act, a graduation speech about second chances that preaches without raising its voice. The film wants to be liked. Mostly it is.