DVD Review: Comic pair lacks chemistry in ‘Get Hard’

“Get Hard” is Will Ferrell’s first “buddy” pairing since he teamed up with Mark Wahlberg in the hilarious “The Other Guys.” This time around his partner is Kevin Hart, and — while Hart, unlike Wahlberg, is a full-on comedian — the pairing simply doesn’t work.

It’s hard to know whether the two men don’t have much inherent chemistry or the lackluster script sapped their enthusiasm. Ferrell plays a member of the 1% of the 1%, a hedge fund guy, who is indicted for fraud, convicted and sentenced, not to a country club prison but to the most violent available facility. (The judge is trying to send a signal.)

He knows he’s utterly unprepared for years among the hardest of hard cases and realizes that he needs someone with experience to coach him. He’s insanely naive and cut off from the real world — he is in fact innocent of the crimes and made an easy patsy for the real crooks — so he assumes that any black man will fit the bill. He hires his parking lot attendant (Hart) to tutor him, not realizing that the latter is a middle-class entrepreneur type.

The setup is a variation on the 1983 Eddie Murphy/Dan Aykroyd film “Trading Places,” but nowhere near as funny or well-crafted. The screenplay seems composed of a laundry list of inevitable farce setups. Ferrell, as always, comes up with funny improv material, but Hart’s timing never seems quite right here, despite the actor’s efforts.

The image and sound on the Blu-ray are perfectly acceptable and unspectacular. The disc — as well as the stand-alone DVD — includes about an hour of extras. There’s 25 minutes of deleted scenes — stuff that was rightly judged inferior to the marginally funny material that ended up in the film. By far the best supplements are quick-cut montages of improv variations of various scenes, mostly courtesy of Ferrell.

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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).