Great comedies are in short supply these days, but “72 Hours” offers a reminder that a crime subplot can quickly ruin even a potentially average one. Directed by Tim Story (“Barbershop,” “Ride Along”) and written by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg (the “Harold & Kumar” trilogy, “American Reunion”), this latter-day “Hangover” retread did not need to do anything but, you know, deliver laughs in order to tickle audiences’ funny bones. But even with a cast led by Kevin Hart and stacked with “Saturday Night Live” alums Marcello Hernández, Ben Marshall and Kam Patterson, this summertime confection from Netflix frantically — and disappointingly — throws everything at the wall in the hopes that something will stick.
Hart plays Joe, a 40-year-old advertising executive who mistakenly gets added to a group text for the Miami bachelor party of Mason (Mason Gooding), which is being thrown by his twentysomething friends Nick (Hernández), Hunter (Marshall) and Freshman (Patterson). When his latest campaign for a vodka brand gets dismissed as “cringe” by a colleague, threatening an upcoming promotion, Joe persuades Mason and his pals to invite him to join them, in the hopes of acquiring more intimate knowledge of a younger generation of consumers.
