NIGHT SCHOOL (12A)**
Dir: Malcolm D Lee
With: Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish
Runtime: 111 minutes
HIGHER learning fails every test except base humour and lazy racial stereotypes in this coming-of-middle-age comedy. Based on a script credited to six writers including leading man Kevin Hart, it revises the tropes of high school movies since The Breakfast Club but can’t muster an original thought in almost two hours. It’s depressing that comic whirlwind Tiffany Haddish, who single-handedly made Girls Trip one of last year’s guiltiest pleasures, isn’t given the material to achieve top grades. Hart’s flawed hero grates and co-stars hang performances on single character traits. Graduates without a single decent laugh.
Black 47 (15) ***
Dir: Lance Daly
With: Hugo Weaving, James Frecheville
Runtime: 100 minutes
LANCE Daly’s drama, set in Ireland in 1847 as the famine did its worst, has been called an Irish Braveheart, such is the welcome it has had domestically. James Frecheville plays Feeney, a soldier who fought overseas for the British but has now come home. The suffering that Feeney finds sends him on a quest for revenge, with the British (represented by Freddie Fox’s captain) and a former serviceman (Hugo Weaving) leading a posse to catch him. Daly’s film plays like a revenge western, with his protagonists trading the midwest for the wilds of Connemara. If the treatment is broad brush, the action scenes are thrilling.
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