In the interests of fairness, I confess that I laughed twice during the screening of this sexual-assault and racial-stereotyping romp; once at a joke about The Notebook (delivered by Kevin Hart), and once at a dumb/funny gag about choices, or the lack of them (delivered by Ferrell). So that’s one laugh apiece for each of the movie’s stars. The rest of the time, I found myself wondering how long a comedy driven by the fear of homosexual rape could last before somebody stormed the projection box. The answer was – very long indeed, with Hart and Ferrell wisecracking endlessly about sucking dick, eating balls, and shoving pointed objects up their assholes, pausing only to indulge in some “ironic” racism.
The setup finds Ferrell’s businessman preparing for 10 years of incarcerated sodomy by enlisting Hart’s poor black car-washer to teach him about life on the inside – the “joke” being that Hart is actually a law-abiding African-American. Audiences howled with outrage when the film was unveiled at the SXSW festival, but having been warned of its problems I could muster little more than stony silence. Actually, I wanted to tell the film-makers where to shove it, but having seen the movie it’s clear that they’ve already done so.
