"Life" (1999) - Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy...
Last fall, Eddie Murphy took on a very subdued (at least by his standards) role in "Holy Man," and turned out a splendid performance that deserved much better than the mediocre reception it received. In that movie, he wasn't constantly stealing scenes, and his trademark horse-laugh was nowhere to be found. Both he and the movie were remarkably funny, and Murphy's restrained performance was both admirable and successful. I thought that maybe, after almost twenty years, Murphy had finally learned that he's not the most important person in the theatre - the viewer is.
Last weekend, "Life" opened around the country, earning over $20 million. It is funny, but intermittently. Certainly not as funny as it could have been, had Murphy remembered what he learned from G, the Zen-spouting mystic he played in the previous movie.
"Life" gets off to a slow start, taking over thirty minutes to get leads Murphy and Martin Lawrence into the central premise - two New Yorkers given a life sentence to a Mississippi state prison, circa 1932. Convicted of a murder they didn't commit in the segregationist South, the story of how they got there is so bizarre and convoluted it could only happen in the movies.
Once there, the movie really takes off, introducing the viewer to a whole cast of usual suspects. Miguel A. Nunez Jr. is the probably-gay character, Bokeem Woodbine is the probably-savant character, and so on. Rarely are characters drawn out past the point of a stereotype, but in this case it works. "Life" goes for the quick gag, the cheap chuckle, and more often than not gets it. Unfortunately, this means that very little in the way of character development ever happens, and (in classic, old-school Murphy style) roughly half of the script consists of words that can't be printed in this paper.
Occasionally, it gets even more ambitious, trying to work in a bit of a story too. These efforts generally fall flat, a shame because the raw material available given the premise and setting is so rich. "Life" is primarily a comedy; those who want a far better version of `the message' should watch (or read) "The Shawshank Redemption," Stephen King's seminal prison tale. The broad stereotypes that work so well to build comedy are exactly why the drama fails to register.
Running just shy of two hours, "Life" isn't exactly a life sentence, but it is very slow-paced in all the wrong places. Much of the bathroom humor (and language) wears thin; why some of those slow spots weren't filled with original jokes, or character development, remains a mystery. Even the outtakes, shown at the end of the film with the credits, are funnier than some of what was used in the movie proper.
"Life" has a few bright spots, scattered randomly throughout the rest of the film. Wait for the home video release, and make a game out of trying to find them. It'll be at least as entertaining as the rest of the movie.
(This review was originally published in The Capaha Arrow, the student newspaper of Southeast Missouri State University.)
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