Central Intelligence - 2016

The "Rock" (Dwayne Johnson) wears a fanny-pack, a My Little Pony tee and is an unstoppable secret agent who reconnects to hisold high school hero Golden Jet (Kevin Hart) while simultaneously undermining a conspiracy of double agent activity that could lead to worldwide disaster.

The film depends heavily upon the visual of a rather diminutive Kevin Hart compared on screen with the enormous Dwayne Johnson (in this way it's a faint echo of older films like the Schwarzenegger/DeVito Twins of 1988), and the humor in Central Intelligence (script and story by Ike Barinholtz, David Stassen, Rawson Marshall Thurber) mines that (plus the flashback "fat" jokes from the high school years of the characters) with a certain level of off-the-cuff funniness while trying to stay on the legal side of political correctness about body humor - - no small task in the 21st century. Joking aside (which is half the film) the other half is the impossible deeds of the heroes against intelligence agents of the United States who are not necessarily on the side of the United States. In between is the story of "Golden Jet" having to face that his high school years were apparently the high point of his life and he now drudges away through a career as an accountant with extremely lowered expectations... that is until Dwayne Johnson shows up and turns his world upside down.

Action film-comedy hybrids can sometimes have a tough time balancing the matter of whether we have tension about the heroics and the evil of the dangerous bad guys while also being instructed by the film to laugh it all off as the jokes around the explosions and bullets fly. Central Intelligence gets more from the humor and tension from the simple question of who is and who isn't the "rogue agent." The feats of prowess in fighting, shooting, dodging bullets and surviving the violence constantly being directed at our heroes isn't so much our worry over their making it out alive instead more like the basic question of a detective story: in what clever way will they do it, since we know they will, the threat of destruction just not strong enough. At its most effective, Central Intelligence is a well polished comedy with an excellent display of stunt work.

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