Aubrey Malone
Central Intelligence (12A)
It takes a special kind of genius to come up with a plot as ridiculous as this. When it starts out with a grossly overweight high-school child being humiliated in front of a gymnasium full of his fellow pupils, you get the feeling, as Alice in Wonderland might put it, that it’s going to get “curiouser and curiouser”. And it does.
Said student becomes an agent for the CIA and 20 years later recruits his former best friend Calvin (Kevin Hart) to help him track down a traitor who’s about to sell state secrets. Calvin is a clumsy accountant whose life hasn’t panned out the way he might have liked after being voted ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ as a young man. Think Arnold Schwarzenneger and Danny de Vito being transplanted from Twins into a Pythonesque blitzkrieg of adolescent histrionics.
The only thing you can say for sure about Central Intelligence is that is doesn’t have much intelligence. Or a centre.
For 108 minutes, we watch pint-sized Calvin and gentle giant Bob (Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson) alternate juvenile banter with technical mumbo-jumbo about encrypted codes and whatnot as they run from a heavy gang of CIA agents on their tail.
Whatever Johnson didn’t use to have as an actor, he still doesn’t. Hart is more like a demented Eddie Murphy figure – or, as he’s referred to at one stage, “a black Will Smith”. Will Smith is black. This, one presumes, is the film’s idea of a joke. Ho ho.
It has more twists than a pretzel. Is Bob really working for the government or is he the villainous Black Badger we hear so much about? Sadly, it’s hard to care one way or the other. As Calvin says during one of the frenetic shoot-outs that pepper this crazy would-be comedy: “I don’t care who betrayed who.” My sentiments exactly.
Outlandish
Some of the scenes are so outlandish they’re hilarious, like when Bob pretends to Calvin’s wife that he’s a marriage counsellor (having hung the real one in a wardrobe). During scenes like this, James Bond turning into Dr Phil without batting an eye, insanity rules OK. And it works.
There’s a lot of unnecessary vulgarity in the script which is probably the norm for a film with a 12A cert nowadays. At a past pupils reunion scene near the end, we get a kind of anti-bullying message tacked on. During this scene our goofy CIA agent gets to convey his devotion for a girl-next-door type with “two lazy eyes”.
Who thinks up barmy ideas like this? Actually three people: Rawson Marshall Thurber, Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you can usually plot the ineffable awfulness of a film in inverse proportion to the number of people working on the script. In other words, with three, it’s probably going to be three times worse than anything else showing in the multiplex that day.
Poor *