Big Stan [DVD] [2009] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Rob Schneider is Big Stan, a Timeshare salesman who rips off old women. Stan gets convicted for fraud and thanks to his crooked lawyer, gets6 months before going inside. Using this borrowed time, he tries desperately to avoid becoming someones shower buddy. David Carradine (Kill Bill) plays 'The Master', a chain smoking, martial arts expert, who takes pity and teaches Stan how to defend himself in the slammer. Once inside, Stan is the hardest man there, and sets about making prison a safe place for everyone, even forming an interracial book club!

Although theres a disturbing amount of rape jokes (even for a prison comedy), Big Stan is hilarious. Stans parole hearing and the fight scenes in particular are very very funny. Theres also some classic one liners -
"I thought smoking made me look cool, but a limp dick spells nerd in any language".
A large part of the film also plays on social stereotypes.

The ending is utterly predictable, and the final section does drag, but this is an entertaining, no-brainer comedy that has its moments.

Prison is not funny and unfortunately neither is Rob Schneider. `Big Stan' represents his directorial debut and suggests that he should stay in front of the camera, preferably in a small role standing slightly behind Adam Sandler. Schneider plays Stan, a lawyer and conman. He is sent to a maximum security prison, but after some nifty bribing he manages to buy himself a few months before he is locked up. He uses this time to learn martial arts and therefore becomes the Daddy of the jail. Can Stan bring peace and harmony to the prison, and does the warden want that?

Films like `Let's Go to Prison' and `Big Stan' show that making prison funny is extremely difficult. The concepts of molestation, stabbing, racism and fear, are not areas that can be mined for comedy gold. However, this did not stop Schneider as he plunges to the depths of casually making jokes about male rape - possibly the least funny thing you can do in a film. `Big Stan' is meant to be viewed as a light hearted and flyaway film, so why does it include so many worn clichés of the prison genre? The interracial tensions in the prison are dealt with by Stan, but seriously is racism meant to be funny?

To be fair Schneider is by no means the worst thing in this film, he does a decent enough job as a likable crook. It is the rest of the cast and Schneider as a director who fail. David Carradine as the sensei is truly awful and is a sad indication of how he ended to his career. The film feels very cheap and this is down to Schneider's direction and an obvious lack of budget. Have you ever seen a trailer for one of the cheaper National Lampoon films? Well, this is one of those films and feels like it was shot in three rooms and on a poor digital camera.

The version of the film I saw was devoid of extras, which may indicate that the process of making the film was as about as much fun as watching it. This is one to miss, even for fans of daft comedies.

Rob Schneider is a brilliant actor , deuce bigallow is a wickedly funny film aswell . All his films are excellent .