Movie Review: Kevin Hart finds the Bottom — “Livestream from Hell”

A running gag of Kevin Hart’s latest, “Livestream from Hell,” is that he’s made boatloads of money and built his brand by monetizing every minute of every waking day, and he hasn’t uplifted other Black talent as he’s done it.

So with his first effort to break into and “dominate” livestreaming “entertainment,” he drags Kai Cenat (“Good Burger 2”), Kel Mitchell (“Good Burger”), model Winnie Harlow, La La Anthony, Fanum and Marshawn Lynch onto the screen to do just that.

The results are disastrously unfunny, a sloppy, half-scripted, half-assed “livestream gone wrong” that finds a laugh here and there and some of the cringier moments in Hart’s long and lucrative showbiz history.

I mean, nothing tops Jerry Seinfeld’s humiliation of him, seating him on the floorboard of a vintage racecar in “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” But this comes close.

The gimmick here is having 47 year-old Hart trying his hand at getting in the latest thing, by making a livestream with film production values, that looks “cinematic” and will position him as “unstoppable” in “the next evolution of the space.”

He is utterly convincing as a grasping mini-mogul always selling…something — himself, mainly.

That kind of explains the dopey online forum discussion of this “movie” as “real” or “fake.”

People, it’s about a livestream that devolves into bloody violence. Then again, it also tries to test your definition of what constitutes “fake.”

The gimmick is that Hart brings in his actor/influencer/streamer pal Kai and his running make Druski to his 32 room Hollywood Hills mansion, which has been wired up with scores of voice-command/self-tracking cameras and microphones for an afternoon and evening of staged, hyped shenanigans.

We watch them “switch on” and paste on their biggest smiles and fakest laughs for the “chat” crowd out there in too-much-time-online-land. And those viewers check in and pile on the comments throughout the day’s stunts — games, quizzes and a visit by a succession of Hart-friends.

Jerry O’Connell tries to bake his “red carpet cookies” for the lads, and is thrown off by the gonzo amateurs Hart has tied himself to, and their unfiltered use of that all purpose slur-turned-affectionate, um “pronoun.”

“STOP USING THE N-WORD,” the flustered white baker-boy shrieks!

Model Winnie Harlow comes in, rapper Sexxy Red, model/actress La La Anthony, each of them making a hasty and “insulted” exit.

Ex-footballer-turned actor Marshawn Lynch comes in for their weekly tennis match, which he’ll squeeze in before finding himself a sex worker “to do something strange for a little piece’a change.”

And then something gets out of hand and there’s a body to dispose of, a live-streaming audience to try and keep in the dark (“MUTE audio!”) about what’s going down and going wrong.

All along, commenters fill the side of the cluttered, flustered screen with a steady stream of “It’s fake” and “Kev SHARTED!” comments.

Lynch is the funniest persona in this, with everybody else flailing and amping up the anger and energy in a variety of fruitless ways.

The failure isn’t so much in not getting that “livestream” vibe down. Other movies have tried that. It’s that none of this is cinematic, particularly surprising or remotely as amusing as those improvising off a script by Binian Bizuneh and Kevin Healey suppose.

Director David Janoff and the editors have to try and tie a lot of pointless “action” coming from a slew of cameras into not just a narrative, but something that doesn’t give you eye fatigue and bury you under boring clutter.

They all fail. Every damned one of them.

And for those of us waiting on Hart to answer that wake-up call, that some offers should remain just that, “offers,” and that there’s value in leaving petty change BS like “Livestream from Hell” on the table while you look for something better? We’re still waiting.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Kevin Hart, Kai Cenat, Sexxy Red, Druski, Jerry O’Connell, La La Anthony, Kel Mitchell, Winnie Harlow, Fanum and Marshawn Lynch.

Credits: Directed by David Janoff, scripted by Binian Bizuneh and Kevin Healey. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:17

Unknown's avatar

About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
This entry was posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.