Chat with the Stars: Hart & Johnson remember high school

Then he reunites with Dwayne Johnson’s Bob Stone. Appoint him ambassador to everything?

“I’m a big, big Dwayne Johnson fan myself”.

What do you get when you get one of the funniest men alive and one of the most charismatic men alive and put them in the same movie together?

Comedian Kevin Hart‘s Los Angeles home was robbed over the weekend. “Since he was bullied, he quit high school after this one particular event”.

In high school, Calvin Joyner (Kevin Hart) was voted Most Likely to Succeed. We’re the Millers director Rawson Thurber (re-writing a script from “The Mindy Project” scribes Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen) quickly reverts to the standard for stand-up driven comedies: getting the main characters to their marks and stopping the film dead so they can mug for five minutes.

Amy Ryan is a terrific actor stuck in a nothing part as Bob’s humorless colleague; a cameo from Aaron Paul serves as a reminder that he needs to stop appending “bitch” to his lines. Chase scenes and shootouts get confusing, but there’s an inspired choice to zero in on Hart’s face while Johnson spins him around an office in a mail cart, which allows the audience to appreciate the actor’s hilarious facial expressions. Johnson, playing a lot of hyper-masculine action roles lately, is a dweeb who loves unicorns, fanny packs and cinnamon pancakes. Johnson is easily a foot (or, 0.3 meters) taller than Hart, and their physical differences are fully exploited for comic effect. “He said to me, “You don’t let nobody push you around” and he got into it with this guy”. Whenever Central Intelligence tries to be an action flick, it’s still engaging enough, but the film neither knows what the hell it’s talking about nor strikes the right balance of self-seriousness and silliness. Johnson versus Steve Carrel in the big-budget Get Smart looks positively realistic compared with most of the big action beats in his newest film. Instead, Hart spends most his time yelling/talking/chatting about poop, and The Rock plays out a helplessly uncool, soft-as-a-marshmallow alter-ego – neither of which pay off.

“Central Intelligence” is the story of a one-time bullied guy, Bob Stone (Dwayne Johnson), who turns into a lethal CIA agent.

Despite its shortcomings, “Central Intelligence” is a satisfyingly sweet summer distraction that should only improve with time and repeat viewings. In the end, you’ll find yourself thinking about better times, but it’s telling that those times are the Ride Along franchise. But Johnson and Hart are a amusing and likeable odd couple, with the Rock doing his charming, goofy action hero thing and Hart doing his twitchy screeching thing.

One kinda amusing touch: Even though Bob is so chiseled he looks like a statue come to life, and he’s capable of taking down four or five bad guys without breaking a sweat, he’s still a major dork.

The hows and whys of the quest at hand aren’t exactly important, as Central Intelligence is far more concerned with squeezing its leading men together-often literally-and kicking back to enjoy the juice, and that’s a wise move. This is what happens when improv becomes too prevalent: writing becomes lazy because amusing people, it’s assumed, will always be amusing. Classmates were relentless in their harassment, but “Robbie” bottled all that energy into a fuel that helped him transform into the lean, mean, CIA-agent-machine known as Bob Stone.