Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell, one walks tall, and the other is short. Oh, and one comedian is black and one comedian is white. Assumptions of different crimes, for different folks: that's the set-up joke in the new comedy Get Hard.
Ferrell's James is a Bernie Madoff-type, who's sentenced to a 10-year jail sentence after skimming massive amounts of his client's dollars off the top. He asks Darnell (Hart), who he kinda, sorta, might know to help him toughen up for prison. Because James kinda, sorta thinks that Darnell did some time himself. Hart, for monetary gain fakes it. He's never been in prison. His wife (Edwina Findley Dickerson) ain't so sure about the ruse.
So like Hart's upcoming Wedding Ringer, he's a guy that curly-haired white dudes hire to help them become someone else. But Ferrell-Hart is way more appealing of a comedy duo than Gad-Hart. Hart told USA Today, that they riffed hard: "You have Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart. You know doggone well we're not staying on the script... Sometimes it would fall flat, and then we'd nail it —home run."
Speaking of that script they're straying from: Hard marks the directorial debut of Etan Cohen. Who, other than being one misplaced "h" away from being Ethan Coen, was a screenwriter on such films as Idiocracy, Tropic Thunder, and Men in Back III. If you want to see if Ferrell does indeed "get hard", you'll have to wait until March 27, 2015.
