Movie Review: 'Fatherhood' Strands Kevin Hart in Sitcomic Clichés

Fatherhood stars Kevin Hart as Matt. We meet Matt on the day of his wife’s funeral. Matt’s wife died shortly after giving birth to their first child, Maddy. It's a strong start and Kevin Hart proves right away that he can play grief. The film flashes back and introduces us to Matt's wife, Liz played by Deborah Ayorinde, and for a few minutes you think we might be watching an original take on single parenthood. Sadly, this only lasts about 10 minutes before we are into poopy diapers and baby vomit. It's a sinking feeling because you can sense what kind of movie Fatherhood could be if it weren't constantly striving for the lowest common denominator gags.

Fleeting moments of Fatherhood make you think that this movie might be smarter than that but it’s not. For instance, Matt requests to work from home so that he can care for his daughter and his boss, played by Paul Reiser, asks if he’s ever heard of a babysitter, a rather reasonable notion and one that the movie dismisses because that would prevent the film from engaging in workplace baby schtick. The plot requires Matt to deplore the idea of childcare because you can't have wacky complications if Matt actually accepts the help of others like a normal person would.

A quick aside, in Fatherhood this device, Matt being suspicious of babysitters, takes the trite and played out perspective of a childcare specialist who is a space cadet, a strange woman who might be a professional at caring for children but she’s too weird and new age-y for our down to earth everyman, Matt. Can we ever retire the joke about every childcare professional in a movie being a weirdo? I feel as if I see this in any movie or television series involving new parents. I was surprised that the makers of Fatherhood didn't have Matt do a montage of weirdos whom have applied to be babysitters and are assigned weird traits that Matt finds off-putting. That gag would be par for the course for the rest of the jokes in this movie.

Fatherhood introduces this type cringe inducing boilerplate joke over and over again. The baby can’t sleep and cries all night and it causes Matt to fall asleep at work the following day. He’s also brought the baby to work with him during a very important meeting because the movie needs to perform a lot of baby schtick. Matt thinks he hears the baby crying and leaves the meeting to go take care of the baby. Matt then performs the rest of the meeting holding the baby, shirtless because babies need skin to skin contact, and they have to whisper because white noise is helping the baby sleep.

The movie piles one annoying cliché or wacky sitcom premise on top of another until you grow too tired to roll your eyes at it. I wanted to fast forward this scene so I could stop feeling secondhand embarrassment for star Kevin Hart as he fumbles his way through this trite comic premise better suited for an episode of Full House than for a movie about a father dealing with the loss of his wife while struggling to raise a baby alone.

This portion of Fatherhood is not great but Kevin Hart does what he can with it. You can sense that he wants to explore aspects of grief and the challenges of being a single father but the movie keeps throwing these nonsensical obstacles in his way. Then, at about the start of the second act, the movie jumps ahead in time several years. After giving Matt a win in showing that he’s helped Maddy through the hardest parts of being a baby, the movie jumps ahead to him successfully navigating fatherhood alone.

Melody Hurd takes over the role of Maddy at 6 years old. She’s now a smart, independent, and curious little girl. She likes wearing boys' clothes, playing poker for cookies with dad and his friends, and she hates conforming to the demands of her Catholic School. The movie briefly finds a good rhythm in this section and introduces a love interest for Matt that is genuinely sweet. Unfortunately, there must be more forced obstacles to create flimsy drama. Maddy has an accident at school while Matt is off with his new girlfriend, Swan (Dewanda Wise). This causes Matt to go into a spiral that leads him to take Maddy to her grandparents and he considers leaving her there to be raised by his late wife’s parents, played by Alfre Woodard and Frankie Faison.

Here, the Paul Reiser character is used as a paper villain. He wants Matt to travel to Croatia to open a new office of whatever the hell this company does. In a bizarre scene, Reiser's character, apparently a father himself, says it will be great for a single father to abandon his child for a month to work in a foreign country. This might be something that people do for their work but as it is portrayed here, Reiser's character is forced to talk like no human being on the planet, bluntly telling a single father that he should abandon his child for a financial reward.

It doesn't help that the movie can't decide if Reiser's character is a villain or not. He allowed Matt to have weeks away from work after the death of his wife and let's him work from home but he's also asking him to abandon his child. At one point he appears to be ready to fire Matt but he immediately turns around on that and says that was never in his thoughts, he's just concerned for his employee and his wellbeing. It's a confounding portrayal, a classic screenwriter's trick, employing a character as needed for forced melodrama.

I will credit director Paul Weitz and screenwriter Dana Stevens for not making Alfre Woodard’s character a full on villain. A lesser movie would have a court battle where grandma says Matt is an unfit parent and Matt must prove what a great dad he is with a courtroom monologue where his daughter cries out for her daddy. Fatherhood doesn’t take that tact, thankfully. Woodard and Hart's relationship is actually the best part of Fatherhood. The two have terrific adversarial chemistry because their fights are based in a mutual care for each other and the movie smartly comments on how similarly stubborn the two are.

That is at least one pitfall typicality that Fatherhood narrowly avoids but it is one of the few. Sadly, too much of Fatherhood relies on the same well worn tropes that Hollywood has heaped on single parenthood for decades. In an attempt to reflect and sympathize with the difficulties single parents go through, Hollywood has created a superficial series of obstacles that never fail to feel forced and false.

Going into Fatherhood I assumed Kevin Hart’s desire to go for poopy diaper jokes would be the problem. Instead, Hart appears perfectly capable of delivering genuine laughs and insight in this character and it is director Paul Weitz and screenwriter Dana Stevens who’ve scripted every joke ever made about caring for a baby into Fatherhood. The moments when Hart wants to show more of this character, especially in wonderful scenes opposite Woodard, they keep getting interrupted by poop and baby vomit gags or the forced dramatics of plot construction.

Fatherhood is desperately at odds with itself. Kevin Hart appears perfectly capable of making a funny and complex movie about the struggle of a single father but the screenplay and direction keep getting in the way with a lot of dimwitted sitcom antics. Perhaps if you really like Kevin Hart and you haven’t seen these jokes a million times, you might find something to enjoy about Fatherhood. I don't recommend it, but Kevin Hart is trying hard and that does go a long way toward making me not hate Fatherhood. The film is streaming now on Netflix.