Let's Go To Prison (2006)

I'm not going to pretend there are no laughs in the alleged comedy Let's Go To Prison. On the contrary, there is exactly one laugh in Let's Go To Prison. Here it is.

You've now seen all of the good parts. You're welcome.

The terrible premise: Career criminal John Lyshitski (Dax Shepard) hates the judge who keeps sentencing him to prison, so when the judge dies Lyshitski gets the judge's son, Nelson Biederman IV (Will Arnett), put in prison, then gets himself put in prison so he can torture Biederman in retaliation for his father's misdeeds. Instead of, say, just not committing any more crimes. Or torturing Biederman on the outside. Or being mad at himself for being such a dumb criminal, rather than at the judge who keeps sending this guy to prison for stuff he's actually done wrong.

Let's Go To Prison shares some disturbing parallels with the alleged comedy Unaccompanied Minors, in that both films feature a lot of funny people popping up without any of them ever doing or saying anything funny. This is a movie directed by the co-creator of one of my favorite shows ever ("Mr. Show with Bob and David") and starring an actor from one of my favorite shows ever ("Arrested Development," duh). It's also written by a bunch of guys from "Reno 911" (everyone else's favorite show ever). All that talent resulted in one funny scene, and that scene isn't funny because of its dialogue, because there isn't any.

Let's Go To Prison is one of the most lazily written movies I've ever seen. Shepard's character is named "John Lyshitski" for no other reason than to have the word "shit" every couple of lines in the film. The movie opens with Lyshitski delivering an endless voiceover monologue that offers statistics about prison life: how many people are in prison, how long they stay there, what happens once they get out. Some of these facts might be interesting in the context of a Morgan Spurlock documentary, but it starts the movie out on such a serious note that the filmmakers can only wrestle their way back into comedic territory by repeatedly reminding us that the main character's last name has the word "shit" in it. Also, one of the lines from the opening monologue is as follows: "Enough people are raped in prison to fill a stadium more than three times. Can you picture that? Three stadiums of people raping each other? I know I can't."

Perhaps this movie is actually a genius experiment. Since there's no way all of the dialogue can actually be from an original script, the writers must have stitched the script together using only lines that were spoken by comedians on VH1's "Half-Hour Comedy Hour" in the 1980s. Like Moises Kaufman's "The Laramie Project," Let's Go To Prison must only draw on secondary source material to achieve its structure. After all, there's no other excuse for material like this:

*A joke about Drakkar Noir.
*A joke about someone stealing the giant check out of the Publisher's Clearinghouse van and then taking it to a bank and trying to cash it.
*The following observation about people who serve on juries: "These people are so dumb they couldn't think of a way to get out of jury duty."

And that same jury that's supposedly so dumb then proceeds to find a guilty man guilty. Who's dumb now, Let's Go To Prison?

Recommendation: You already have the video link of the only funny twenty seconds of the movie. Why are we still discussing this?