Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Well, maybe fallen is too strong. Oh, how the mighty are slummin’. Saw these two stinkers over the weekend…
Let’s Go To Prison
On the surface, Let’s Go To Prison has enough great ingredients to make what should have been a great comedy. You’ve got Will Arnett, one of the highlights of the late Arrested Development, Bob Odenkirk of TV’s Mr. Show with Bob & David starring and directing, as well as your typical ‘fish out of water’ prison setting. Unfortunately, despite the relatively good materials, the finished product leaves a lot to be desired. The script has too much filler and nothing seems to happen for a reason, it’s as if everything that happens in the film was thought of at the last-minute. The prison setting is admittedly getting pretty cliched and tired (which may be why movies like Half Baked only used it in small doses), what with all of the rape and shitty food jokes, but instead of bringing something fresh to the cliché, the film just revels in the well-worn rut of irrelevance. It’s no wonder this bombed so bad at the box office and garnered little acclaim; it truly is a bad movie, made worse by the fact that it had potential. Even the DVD reeks of being cast-off as an abomination. The special features consist of two deleted scenes and some interviews with the musicians who were in on the making of the soundtrack (Ray Parker Jr.’s a loooong way from Ghostbusters here). I can’t recall a single instance of laughing out loud, though there are a few scenes where I wore an extended smirk. Much like what came before it, the ending also feels tacked-on and last-minute (in fact, one of the two deleted scenes is an alternate ending). Avoid, avoid, avoid.
Reno 911! Miami
Reno 911 is a brilliant TV show. It took a while to grow on me, but once it did I quickly snatched up the DVDs as they became available and watched and rewatched them. The movie, on the other hand, even as an avid fan of the show, isn’t really even worth seeing once. The Reno SD find themselves the sole protectors of Miami after the police convention they weren’t allowed to participate in becomes subject to a biological attack. Alright, the premise is a stretch, but it has potential. Unfortunately, the potential is never really reached. Instead, you get what amounts to enough funny material to fill maybe one episode of the TV series and a LOT of filler and jokes that fall so flat you almost feel bad for the cast. It’s tempting to say that the cast just wanted to see how much they could fuck around with a huge budget and spent the entire movie doing just that. There are a handful of funny bits, but they’re sandwiched in between the kind of material that would have gotten the show canceled in its first season like so many of Comedy Central’s other shows. There’s not enough here to make fans of the show happy and it’s not the kind of thing a non-fan or someone coming into it having little or no knowledge of the show will appreciate either. What the fuck were they thinking?
