The “cornrow” scene on the poster doesn’t happen in the film, but the high concept is delivered more or less efficiently, creating a tasteless, incorrect but quite funny provocation: basically an incorrect and funnier version of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, with a dash of Trading Places. Will Ferrell is James, the grotesquely rich and entitled LA hedge-fund manager, convicted of fraud and sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin . Desperate, he begs the guy who washes his car, Darnell (Kevin Hart), for advice on surviving in prison.
The tumescent gag in the title is your cue, and there follows an avalanche of material about the inevitability of being made someone’s bitch, or making someone else your bitch, and the counter-intuitive business of being a tough prison heterosexual by accepting this idea and owning it. One of the toughening-up tests Darnell sets James is having to blow a stranger in the men’s lavatories of a gay brunch venue: “When life gives you dick, you make dick-ade”, Darnell says – a profound truth he claims comes from “Dickipedia”. Hart has what I can only describe as a Robin Williams comedy showcase moment in the mock prison yard he has built on James’s tennis court: impersonating all the aggressive gang leaders James could possibly encounter in one extended scene. I was half hoping for, and half-fearing, a cameo from Mike Tyson.
