The opening scene of Die Hart drops us into the absurdity of Kevin Hart‘s career meltdown live on a talk show, setting the tone for a film that never quite decides if it wants to be a meta-commentary on Hollywood or just another star vehicle. Directed by Eric Appel, this re-edited version of Quibi’s short-lived series is a messy but intermittently entertaining ride, blending action tropes with self-deprecating humor.

Hart plays an exaggerated version of himself: a comedian desperate to shed his “laughing stock” image and become an action star. The premise is ripe for satire. Forced into Ron Wilcox’s (John Travolta) boot camp for wannabe action heroes, Hart’s physical comedy collides nicely with the hyper-masculine posturing of his fellow trainees, particularly Josh Hartnett and Nathalie Emmanuel. Emmanuel brings real wit to her role as Jordan King, even if her character’s abrupt accent switch mid-series lands as an afterthought rather than a punchline.

A standout sequence has Hart trying to outrun a train, and the stunt goes hilariously wrong in a way that recalls old-fashioned slapstick dressed up with modern CGI mishaps. It works because it plays to what Hart does best: the wide-eyed reactions, the flailing, the way he throws his whole body into a joke. Elsewhere the choreography goes stiff and the pacing lurches; scenes cut off mid-beat, a hangover from the film’s episodic origins. Travolta, though, is reliably good value as Ron Wilcox. He plays the gruff mentor with an ease that makes the character’s early hostility toward Hart feel almost incidental rather than earned. Their rapport eventually settles into something like mutual respect, but the script never digs past the banter to find out what’s underneath it.

Jordan King deserved to be more than a counterweight to the men around her. Emmanuel plays her with warmth and a sharp tongue, and the late reveal that she’s actually British, not from Chicago as she’d claimed, should land as a real character beat. Instead it arrives and vanishes in the same scene. It doesn’t get room to breathe.

Structurally, Die Hart is a patchwork, and you can feel the seams where episodes were stitched into a feature. Subplots such as Hart also playing his own stunt double, Doug Eubanks, feel bolted on rather than built in. The film swings between sincere action beats and winking self-awareness without ever settling on either. Still, the meta-humor has real snap in places. Hart’s increasingly desperate bids to impress the director Claude Van De Velde (Jean Reno), who runs the training camp like a small war, are funny precisely because Reno plays the absurdity completely straight.

That production history is worth sitting with. Die Hart began life as a Quibi series, built for phones and short attention spans, and when Quibi folded, the first season got cut down into this film. You can feel that compression everywhere: in scenes that end a beat too soon, in jokes that don’t have room to land. The original series picked up seven Emmy nominations for its performances, which says more about what Hart, Travolta and Emmanuel can do individually than about how well this particular cut hangs together as a movie.

The tonal seesaw, sincere one minute and self-parodying the next, never resolves. The film’s debts to classic action-comedy are obvious without ever being matched. Its ideas about reinvention and Hollywood’s appetite for humiliating its own stars are there if you look for them, but they keep getting buried under the seams of a show that was never built to be a film in the first place.

Die Hart knows perfectly well how ridiculous its premise is. What it never quite manages is convincing you to trust it all the way. Lean into the absurdity and it flies. Reach for sincerity and it stalls.