72 Hours Review: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
72 Hours is a forgettable Netflix bachelor party comedy wastes a solid premise and a genuinely likeable young cast by centering everything on Kevin Hart’s increasingly tired schtick — though Mason Gooding, Marcello Hernández, and Kam Patterson hint at a much better film that exists just outside the frame. It is not offensively bad, just disappointingly average for a concept that had genuine comedic potential.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Director: Tim Story
Platform: Netflix
Release: July 24, 2026
Cast: Kevin Hart, Marcello Hernández, Mason Gooding, Kam Patterson, Ben Marshall, Teyana Taylor
Runtime: 105 mins
There is a version of 72 Hours that actually works. You can almost see it hovering at the edges of the film that exists. Four young guys — genuine friends, emotionally mature in ways that most bachelor party comedies would never dare to depict — planning a weekend in Miami before one of them gets married.
An older man accidentally joins them and finds himself wildly out of step with a generation that checks in on each other’s feelings before getting drunk and keeps a physical scrapbook of shared memories. The comedy of that cultural gap, played honestly and without condescension, could have been genuinely funny and maybe even a little moving.
Instead, we get Kevin Hart doing Kevin Hart things for 105 minutes.
The setup follows Joe, a 40-year-old advertising executive whose ability to read younger audiences has completely evaporated. When he is accidentally added to a group text about a Miami bachelor party, he talks his way in by paying for everything, hoping to harvest content for a struggling campaign.
The young men at the centre — Mason, played by Mason Gooding, who is about to get married; Nick, played by Marcello Hernández, his reluctant best friend; Hunter and Freshman, played by Ben Marshall and Kam Patterson — are the film’s real discovery.
They are funny, believably close, and written with more emotional intelligence than bachelor party comedies usually bother with. Nick’s complicated feelings about his friend getting married are addressed directly and honestly almost immediately rather than saved for a third-act revelation. It is a refreshing choice.
But the film is not really about them. It is about Joe. And the more Joe dominates the screen, the more the film loses what made its opening promise interesting. Hart’s performance is the same reliable product he has been delivering for years — physically committed, self-deprecating, loudly insecure — but it has worn thin in a way the film itself seems to recognise without knowing how to fix.
Similar Read: Chennai Love Story Review
A running bit where Joe adopts a ridiculous drug-lord alter ego is acknowledged as a racist stereotype by the characters around him, which might be the most honest the film gets, though acknowledgement is not the same as avoiding the mistake.
Teyana Taylor appears as Joe’s girlfriend and delivers a performance that belongs in a more grounded film entirely. Marcello Hernández shows genuine screen presence and comic timing that his limited character cannot fully showcase.
Director Tim Story, who has made this kind of film before with Hart, stages the chaos efficiently enough. The problem is not the direction. It is that the script keeps reaching for escalating wackiness when the quiet character moments it occasionally stumbles into are significantly more compelling.
Skip it. Or watch the parts without Kevin Hart.
72 Hours is now streaming on Netflix.