The judge issues them brand new numbers and a new, rural address. (Quick, someone stop me before I use the word "Bildungsroman" in the same review as "Martin Lawrence.") The prisoners are petty hustler Ray Gibson (Murphy) and aspiring bank teller Claude Banks (Lawrence), who start off as free men in Harlem, but who find themselves unceremoniously thrown together one fateful night when they can't pay their bar bills.įorced to do a moonshine run in Mississippi to make up the difference, they run into some serious trouble, southern style.Ĭaught near the body of a dead man, they get a bum rap for his murder by the redneck sheriff who did the deed. Let's just say the movie, which has some passing similarities with "The Shawshank Redemption," spans two lifetime sentences. "Life," written by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, is a surprisingly well-textured, if sentimental narrative that starts in Harlem in the 1930s, runs through the war years and civil rights, then continues all the way to Afros and bell-bottoms and I'll stop there in the interest of preserving surprise. Instead of letting the exuberant headliners take a half-witted story line and overrun it with improvisational flair, director Ted Demme channels their performances into the flow of the story.Īnd a good story it is. Murphy and Lawrence to let a project go by without a few nasty licks.īut this movie is much more than a dirty dukeout between two of Richard Pryor's most prominent disciples. Oh, "Life" gets down and dirty, all right. When you saw ads for "Life," a comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, you were expecting a bad-boy raunchfest? You wanted some serious back and forthing between these two of the unprintable variety? Eddie Murphy, right, and Martin Lawrence are in it for the long haul in "Life."Ĭontains fisticuff violence, nudity and obscenity
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |