Successful investment broker James (Will Ferrell) is given 10 years in San Quentin for fraud, with 30 days to get his affairs in order beforehand. Knowing that he will be unable to survive the experience, he hires his black jailbird car cleaner Darnell (Kevin Hart) to toughen him up beforehand. What he doesn't know is that Darnell has never been near a prison.
Will Ferrell is a tall white man and Kevin Hart is a short black man, and the height differential between the tall soft white man and the short aggressive black man is quite a good sight gag. Leaving that to one side for the moment, I admire Will Ferrell's talent but don't like very much of what he does, and I'm not overly familiar with Kevin Hart apart from the fact that I get the impression that he appears to come from the Martin Lawrence school of aggressive, shouty "comedy", so I wasn't expecting great things. And my expectations were born out in the early stages of this film. Predicated upon a contradictory scenario of an extremely stupid man who has made a lot of money by being extremely smart, with humour which otherwise consists mainly of shouting prodigious quantities of profanity and numerous "jokes" about homosexual anal rape, the young audience in the cinema laughed and I didn't.
The middle section - the toughening up boot camp section - was still shouty, sweary, and full of anal rape jokes, but contained some decent moments where the two characters start to bond somewhat. And the final section, where they finally seek to find the evidence necessary to clear James and put the real villain behind bars was actually quite good.
Accordingly, this was better than I expected it to be. But its real audience is people who like sweary anal rape jokes.
Will Ferrell is a tall white man and Kevin Hart is a short black man, and the height differential between the tall soft white man and the short aggressive black man is quite a good sight gag. Leaving that to one side for the moment, I admire Will Ferrell's talent but don't like very much of what he does, and I'm not overly familiar with Kevin Hart apart from the fact that I get the impression that he appears to come from the Martin Lawrence school of aggressive, shouty "comedy", so I wasn't expecting great things. And my expectations were born out in the early stages of this film. Predicated upon a contradictory scenario of an extremely stupid man who has made a lot of money by being extremely smart, with humour which otherwise consists mainly of shouting prodigious quantities of profanity and numerous "jokes" about homosexual anal rape, the young audience in the cinema laughed and I didn't.
The middle section - the toughening up boot camp section - was still shouty, sweary, and full of anal rape jokes, but contained some decent moments where the two characters start to bond somewhat. And the final section, where they finally seek to find the evidence necessary to clear James and put the real villain behind bars was actually quite good.
Accordingly, this was better than I expected it to be. But its real audience is people who like sweary anal rape jokes.