The comedy duo that helped Boomerang land with such a thud comes around again in Life, an episodic but intermittently funny film that follows the wisecracking exploits of a pair of bickering prison inmates over 60 years of incarceration.
The film opens slowly and flatly, taking way too long to introduce us to fast-talking pickpocket Ray Gibson (Eddie Murphy) and penniless bank teller Claude Banks (Martin Lawrence) and to get them into hot water. After picking up a truckload of hooch in Mississippi with the intent of driving it back to New York, the duo make the ill-timed decision to partake of a night of revelry at a roadhouse. Before you can say Stir Crazy, Ray and Claude are framed for murder and condemned to live out their days as wards of the Mississippi State Prison.
It feels more like Mississippi State University. Oh, sure, their fellow inmates look menacing and act a bit hostile at first, but in short order our heroes find themselves enjoying a life not too different from that of frat boys, complete with girls, sports and booze. Not to mention lovely natural scenery; this bucolic pokey, you see, is actually more of a wall-less work camp out in the country. No fences, just a “gun line” beyond which straying convicts are shot first, questioned later. It’s about the most unrealistic and superficial treatment of prison life since Hogan’s Heroes.
But as it was in Hogan’s Heroes, realism is beside the point. The film’s job is to provoke laughs, which, once the protracted pre-jail setup is out of the way, it does. Ray blusters and Claude gripes; their prickly odd-couple friendship gives the film its sentimental core, and their spirited diatribes spike up the comic relief — especially in the final act, when Murphy and Lawrence don old-man prosthetic makeup to play bantering codgers. These colorful cut-ups aren’t ready to step aside for the Chrises — Rock and Tucker — just yet.
Few movie genres are as ripe for parody as the prison melodrama, but Life would rather do its time as a vehicle for its leads’ shtick than try to escape the confines of a predictable story. Still, it’s been a while since either Murphy or Lawrence was this engaging. It’s reassuring to see that there’s still some Life in the old guys.
