NEW YORK -- The ingenuity and talent of the movie industry's trailer creators are well demonstrated by "Let's Go to Prison" because the few laughs this purported comedy contains are fully displayed in its far more amusing trailer. It also provides a lesson in the comparative merits of big-screen vs. television comedies because this inaugural effort from Carsey-Werner films isn't nearly as funny as any episode of the producing pair's legendary sitcoms "Roseanne" and "The Cosby Show," among others.

Not to mention that star Will Arnett doesn't do anything remotely as amusing here as his work in the lamented sitcom "Arrested Development."

The actor plays Nelson Biederman IV, an obnoxious preppy who has been framed by recidivist criminal John Lyshitski (Dax Shepard) and sent to a forbidding prison. It seems that Biederman's judge father was responsible for Lyshitski's most recent incarceration, with the vengeful con also setting himself up to be his victim's cellmate.

Biederman thus goes through the predictable prison rites of passage that will be familiar to anyone who has seen an episode of HBO's "Oz." First he runs afoul of the prison's resident white supremacist badass, and then he incites the amorous advances of Barry (Chi McBride), who attempts to woo him by plying him with the merlot that he has made in his toilet.

While one would think that the setting provides plenty of opportunities for dark-edged, satirical humor, the screenplay, adapted from a nonfiction tome titled "You Are Going to Prison," fails to take advantage of any of them, as well evidenced by the near total silence at an opening-day showing at the Empire Theater on 42nd Street in New York (naturally, it opened without being screened for the press).

Arnett underplays to the point where he seems as shellshocked as his character, while Shepard seems to have forgotten that the film is supposed to be a comedy. Only McBride, who uses his massive girth and deep raspy voice to excellent comic effect, and Susan Messing, in a brief but funny bit as a disabled stripper, manage to garner any laughs at all.

The film, directed by Bob Odenkirk, who also plays a small role as an unctuous lawyer, boasts a certain visual authenticity thanks to its well-chosen location (the now-closed Joliet prison, also the site of Fox's "Prison Break") and a gallery of supporting players who convincingly look like the inmates they are portraying. But the mostly juvenile attempts at humor fail to work -- one exception, where Arnett's character hisses, "I don't take no crap from no Lucian Freud pussies like you," sailed over the heads of the few audience members -- and "Let's Go to Prison" ultimately feels as long as a stint in the big house.