'Don't Get Raped In Prison' Review: Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell's Paycheck Reacharound

By Dustin Rowles | Film | March 27, 2015 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | March 27, 2015 |

In Get Hard, Will Ferrell plays James King, a wealthy investment banker in the mold of Dan Ayrkoyd in Trading Places engaged to a gold digger played by a lingerie-wearing Alison Brie. This is the high point of Get Hard, which happens in the first five minutes:

But don’t worry, ladies. When Brie isn’t prancing around in her underwear or a topless Aryan woman isn’t pressing her boobs against the windshield of a car, Ferrell is showing off his pasty white ass, which — we are reminded every 22 seconds — is under the threat of attack. After being framed for investment fraud by his father in law (Craig T. Nelson) and sentenced to 10 years in a maximum security prison, James King has 30 days to figure out how to avoid being raped in prison.

That’s the joke in Get Hard. The only joke. A more fitting title for the movie would be Don’t Get Raped in Prison, and it would only be slightly more awkward asking for a ticket to that than asking the elderly woman at the theater box-office for a ticket to Get Hard and having to repeat yourself because she didn’t hear you the first time. “I said, one for GET HARD, please.”

Kevin Hart plays Darnell. He owns a car washing business. He agrees — in exchange for enough money to put a down payment on a home in a better neighborhood for his daughter — to teach James how to avoid being raped. He attempts to accomplish this by turning James’ home into a makeshift prison (using James’ minority servants to act as other prisoners) and by teaching James how to suck a dick because sucking a dick in prison is apparently a better alternative than being gang-banged in the ass.

Isn’t prison rape funny? Don’t you want to watch an entire movie about a clueless black man teaching a clueless white man about avoiding anal rape by, for instance, joining a gang of skinheads? Or teaching black gangbangers (not the ass kind, the murdering kind!) how to diversify their portfolios? Doesn’t that sound hilarious?

Well, it’s not. You could be offended by it, but it seems pointless to get outraged over an idiotic prison-rape comedy. To do so only gives it power and obscures the fact that Don’t Get Raped In Prison is a shitty movie poorly slapped together by a committee of screenwriters, badly directed by Etan Cohen, and lazily phoned in by Hart and Ferrell. In fact, the only thing less funny than prison rape is this goddamn movie.