LIFE (Universal) Starring: Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, Obba Babatunde, Nick Cassavetes, Bokeem Woodbine, Ned Beatty. Screenplay: Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone. Producers: Brian Grazer and Eddie Murphy. Director: Ted Demme. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, violence) Running Time: 108 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
LIFE is funny sometimes...just not as often as you might expect. Universal is promoting LIFE just the way you'd expect it to promote a film starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence -- as a raucous comedy with plenty of the insult humor, attitude and gay-baiting their target audience has come to expect. The funny thing is -- or isn't, as the case may be -- that LIFE is actually an attempt by the two comedians to grow up a little. Anyone expecting to see Eddie and Martin doing their version of STIR CRAZY is bound to be somewhat surprised to find Eddie and Martin doing their version of THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION.
It's a commendable effort by two performers best known for more simple-minded material; it's just not a very successful one. The principal action begins in 1932, where two different men find themselves in similar trouble. Small-time hustler Ray Gibson (Eddie Murphy) is in trouble with Harlem crime boss Spanky (Rick James) for running numbers in his territory; mild-mannered Claude Banks (Martin Lawrence) is in trouble with Spanky for being short on the bill in Spanky's club. To save both their skins, Ray offers to bring Spanky a shipment of bootleg liquor from Mississippi, with Claude as his partner. Unfortunately, things go from bad to worse down South, where Ray and Claude are convicted for a murder they didn't commit and end up sentenced to life in the Mississippi State Prison.
Once the narrative gets to the prison setting (which takes around 30 minutes), the story predictably involves the new city-slicker inmates learning the hard facts about their new milieu -- when not to back-talk the bossman (Nick Cassavetes); when to turn over your cornbread to the largest land mammal on two legs (Michael "Bear" Taliferro); why prison makes strange bedfellows (literally). The pacing may be a bit pokey, but it still looks and smells like a mass-market comedy for a while. That's before screenwriters Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone and director Ted Demme start taking some intriguing detours. In one scene, Ray begins describing the nightclub he dreams of starting one day, momentarily taking his fellow inmates somewhere wonderful; in another, a gay inmate (Miguel A. Nunez Jr.) about to be released is treated with sympathy and a bit of dignity. As LIFE unfolds, it starts to feel surprisingly ambitious, not at all like a whoop-it-up crowd-pleaser.
As admirable as LIFE's reach may be, however, it generally exceeds its grasp. While it lays out the sub-plots and advancing years like an epic in the making, the film-makers never appear entirely committed to making a film that could alienate many of the stars' core fans. Key elements of the story -- Claude's fiancee leaving him for another man; a sympathetic superintendent (Ned Beatty) dying before he can act on evidence of our protagonists' innocence; even Ray and Claude's fate in the film's climactic fire -- never actually appear on screen, the information tagged on by an inmate (Obba Babatunde) narrating the tale in flashback. LIFE is a frustrating experience, because every time it appears close to making a connection to its characters it falls back on a lame joke to reassure the viewers that they're still watching a comedy.
I may be kinder to LIFE than it really deserves, simply because I was so surprised by its tone. Martin Lawrence, whose screen work has generally bordered on the insufferable, does some fairly nice work as the straight man in the duo, and Murphy is in fine form as his quintessential fast talker. Rick Baker's old-age makeup is also a star of the show, taking the stars into their 90s (and, in the case of Lawrence, making him look frighteningly like Whitman Mayo). LIFE is effective in bits and pieces, building on the predictable comedy in some unexpected ways. It just never builds on them in the necessary ways, never making the friendship between Ray and Claude its primary dramatic concern. It's a film caught between what the film-makers wanted to do and what the studio must have wanted them to do, just the clashing creation you'd expect from a story that's part STIR CRAZY and part SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 life sentences: 5.
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