My World of Flops Aging Like Toilet Wine Case File #188/Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #220 Let's Go to Prison (2006)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
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Roughly three days ago I moved from a modest condo in Atlanta’s Chamblee Tucker neighborhood to a disconcertingly large house in suburban Alpharetta. My family went from nursing vague plans of moving at some point to a home big enough for our growing family to selling our home and moving in less than a month.
If I have not been updating this website as often as possible as of late that’s the reason: I fucking moved, y’all! It’s scary and anxiety-provoking and more than a little discombobulating as I very hastily said goodbye to my old life in a working class neighborhood in Atlanta proper and hello to a suburban existence in Alpharetta.
That unfortunately means that the very first movie that I watched in my new home was 2006’s Let’s Go to Prison, a critical and commercial flop that marked a grim nadir in director and co-star Bob Odenkirk’s career.
I am gob-smacked that so many staggeringly talented people were involved in this abomination. The much buzzed about screenplay was written by three distinguished alumni of The State in the delightful Thomas Lennon, his longtime writing partner Robert Ben Garant and Michael Patrick Jann.
And the cast! In addition to Will Arnett, Chi McBride and, to a much lesser degree Dax Shepard, the pitch-black comedy co-stars Michael Shannon as the leader of a Nazi prison gang, Dylan Baker as a warden whose big moment is a monologue inviting inmates to write out all of their complaints and then stick the paper up their posteriors, David Koechner, Michael Hitchcock, Jerry Minor and Tim and Eric in uncredited cameos as wine tasters.
As with Run, Ronnie, Run, Odenkirk was unhappy with the way Let’s Go to Prison was edited and, like everyone on earth, unhappy with the final results. Also like Run, Ronnie, Run, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that the film could be saved, or even salvaged, by any number of changes, no matter how vast, considering that nothing, but nothing, in it works, at all.
Perhaps the nicest thing that can be said about Let’s Go to Prison is that it’s less the prison rape comedy promised by the title and poster image of a bar of soap (dropped, no doubt, in keeping with the big bang/grand-daddy of all prison-rape jokes) than a prison romance comedy.
Then again, issues of consent become complicated when that romance is at least partially predicated on one partner threatening to cut off the other’s genitals and keep them in a shoebox if their sexual advances are rejected.
Lennon, Garant and Jann’s screenplay was loosely inspired by You Are Going to Prison, a non-fiction book about the bleakly comic experience of being in prison by Jim Hogshire. I suspect that Hogshire’s non-fiction tome was the source of the endless array of prison factoids dispensed joylessly by Shepard’s narrator/protagonist/anti-hero/villain John Lyshitski.
These include nasty little nuggets like, “Enough people are raped in prison to fill a stadium more than three times”, which prompts the insufferable asshole to ponder, “Can you picture that? Three stadiums full of people raping each other?”
As his last name implies, John Lyshitski is a real piece of shit, a monomaniacal repeat offender who maintains a Jeb Bush energy level at all times and lives to commit senseless crimes and enact revenge.
The prospect of sweet, sweet vengeance against the hanging judge that sentenced him to prison repeatedly is seemingly all that keeps John going during his third stint in the big house. So you can imagine how distraught he is to discover that the stern judge died mere days before he got out.
John instead decides to enact revenge on the late judge’s son Nelson Biederman IV (Will Arnett), a pompous boob similarly devoted to living a life devoid of meaning and value, albeit much higher up the socioeconomic ladder.
The charmless sociopath sabotages his arch-nemesis’ inhaler, leading him to have an asthma attack that causes him to destroy a pharmacy in a mad bid to find a replacement inhaler.
This results in a stiff prison sentence for Nelson but merely knowing that his enemy’s son is in prison is somehow not enough for John. So he decides to let himself get arrested again so that he can do hard time as Nelson’s bunkmate.
Watching a snob like Nelson suffer mightily behind bars at the hands of a slob like John should provide all manner of delicious schadenfreude. We should delight in Nelson’s swift, decisive fall from fancy lad with the world at his feet to suicidally depressed prisoner.
But Arnett makes his character’s confusion and despair so real, vivid and raw, however, that it becomes impossible not to empathize with him on a level that destroys whatever laughs might otherwise be gleaned from his grim predicament.
Dark comedies are often hated with a disproportionate fury because people wrongly think that laughing at bad people being terrible to each other makes them bad people by extension.
That is almost invariably bullshit but Let’s Go to Prison is the exception that proves the rule. Arnett, who seems on the verge of tears throughout much of the film, conveys bottomless agony so viscerally that guffawing at his suicidal pain seems unconscionably cruel.
John first claims Nelson as his sexual property but “sells” him to Barry (Chi McBride), a prisoner with a weakness for toilet wine and romance and a Suge Knight physique and fashion sense. Nelson is understandably afraid of being sexually assaulted during his time in prison but he eventually develops a relationship with Barry that is romantic as well as sexual, loving as well as calculating.
After Nelson accidentally ends up killing the prison yard’s top Nazi he becomes top dog in the yard and the prison begins to change to fit Nelson’s personality instead of the other way around, leading to a climactic fight between Nelson and John that it is impossible to care about.
Let’s Go to Prison goes hard for bitter, nasty, uncomfortable laughs at the expense of everything else: characterization, likability, energy, momentum, warmth and pacing. That wouldn’t be so disastrous if the film had even a single goddamn laugh. It does not. Instead it’s 88 minutes of pokily paced comedy hell.
I went into Let’s Go to Prison expecting the worst, having suffered through it before when I reviewed it during its theatrical release. It still somehow managed to disappoint me by being not just unfunny but toxic, sour and curdled.
There was nowhere to go but up for Odenkirk after Let’s Go to Prison but even diehard fans couldn’t have anticipated the many highs ahead for Odenkirk as a writer, actor and comic mastermind, if not necessarily as a director of films.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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