Central Intelligence: Passable action comedy

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart

Rated: 6/10

It’s around The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) and its all flabby but funny. It’s also around Kevin Hart so it was meant to be funnier, which it isn’t. But together the two script a watchable action comedy that is more comedy than action.

Contacted by Bob Stone (Johnson) whom Calvin Joyner (Hart) once gave a fig leaf when bullies forcefully carried him stark naked and threw him into a gym full of people, Hart becomes crucial to a CIA mission to retrieve some code from rogue Black Badger. He doesn’t want to but is made to. Back in high school, Stone was many stones more than normal weight and an acutely obese loser. Two decades later, he is every woman’s wet dream with rippling muscles and a torso so smooth that you might slip on it. But that’s besides the point. The funny bone of the film is the chase around a project full of ifs and buts, bullets, smashed windows and an uptight FBI woman running in circles to catch Black Badger which she says is Stone, Stone says is an unknown face and Stone’s partner says “Badger is me.”

Along the chase, the film sorts out many issues — marital ones assailing Hart and personal ones freezing up Stone. As a funny character, Stone comes across more as a psychopath than a buffoon and that’s what shapes him so well in this passable comedy. Hart could have done better and not just because he was “Golden Jet” back in High School, the coolest dude with a magical back-flip. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 19 June, 2016