Metacritic reviews

Positively amusing, Night School assures Tiffany Haddish’s lift-off into comedic stardom, continues to sell Kevin Hart’s trademark persona and makes an outspoken case for supporting and encouraging individuals to accept their challenges and to work on moving forward.

Night School has a lot to learn about how to live up to its potential, but it squeaks out a passing grade in the end.

Night School has a handful of laughs, but it’s a bloated trifle that, at 111 minutes, overstays its welcome.

The plot zigs and zags and sometimes accelerates in the direction of genuine hilarity...only to downshift into sloppy, easy jokes and gags.

In the end, it comes up with just over half a dozen decent jokes — about one per writer.

The movie’s merely the latest A-list comedy of this sort, is happy to live in the middle, and yet it frustratingly outwears its welcome because of a lack of creativity and sloppy structure.

While the improvised interplay of the talented cast -- especially between Hart and Haddish -- help keep things moving along, watching Night School ends up largely being an exercise in waiting for something genuinely inspired to happen. It never does.

Scenes go on past their payoff, gags are flogged to death after the punch line.

Director Malcolm D. Lee, whose previous movie, 2017’s raucous “Girls Trip,” gave Haddish her star-making breakout role, does her no favors here. In this mess of a movie, her performance is merely adequate. She, and the audience, deserve better.

Lee’s proven talent for mixing broad situational humor with sly character work is almost completely missing in action here.