But when one of them (Affleck) declares halfway through the movie that he’s had better sex in prison, you know that even this feeble attempt at a plot is wasted and that the movie is doomed to be a goner.
Rudy Duncan (Affleck) is a recently paroled man (hence the sexual tension) who assumes the identity of his murdered cellmate, Nick, in order to do the dirty with Nick’s prison pen-pal Ashley (Theron, she in the silver nail polish and matching padded windbreaker).
It’s difficult to fathom just how they put the character of Ashley together. The pictures of her adorning Nick’s cell walls are of an independent, gorgeous woman, holidaying on her own and building snowmen, yet they would have us believe that this creature would be desperate enough for male company to write to a prison magazine ’cause the boys back home don’t take the trouble to get to know her. Add to that her letters written in pre-adolescent pink ink and the curliest handwriting around, all sealed with lipstick kisses, and you have a loose canon on your hands.
Now as poor Ashley’s luck would have it, her brother Gabriel (a menacing Gary Sinise) is more interested in the boy than she is. Sometime during their lengthy correspondence, Nick apparently let slip that he used to work as a security guard at an Indian casino and it is this information that Gabriel wants from our hero.
It is almost impossible to imagine how Rudy got into jail in the first place (car theft, apparently) as everything about him, including his dazzling white smile and longing for hot chocolate (served with a ‘mighty fine piece of pecan pie’) seems wholly out of place in the harsh world of prison food fights and recreational weightlifting in the prison yard. The fact that someone went out and garnered all the prison stereotypes and forced it upon clean-cut Affleck (including plenty of tattoos) seems like some cruel joke.
Any attempt at a plot falls on the wayside until you are ultimately left with a big and bloody mess. We’ll probably get to see far worse movies this year, but frankly that’s small consolation for sitting through Reindeer Games.