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Since prisons in this country are as overcrowded as Celine Dion’s ego, the new Eddy Murphy/Martin Lawrence comedy Life may only worsen the problem, seeing how it makes jail look like more fun than ergot pizza.
Murphy and Lawrence play Ray Gibson and Claude Banks, a petty hustler and an only slightly better-grounded aspiring white-collar sort, who meet in a 1932 Harlem speakeasy when one picks the other’s pocket. Through contrived circumstance they’re consigned to an uneasy alliance while running a truckload of hooch to Mississippi for the club’s owner, only to get framed by a cracker sheriff for murdering a mean local card cheat (Clarence Williams III) outside a questionable dive named Natchez Under the Hill. Sentenced to perpetuity at Camp 8, a hard-time establishment populated by a bunch of illiterate, albeit colorful, lifers with nicknames such as Jangle Leg, Goldmouth, Biscuit, Can’t Get Right, and Hoppin’ John, who take more kindly to Ray’s Cool Hand Luke-ish daydreams than Claude’s uptightness, they quickly settle into a pattern of swinging between friendship and mere enforced proximity, punctuated by an escape attempt or two. Aided by Oscar-winner Rick Baker’s capable aging makeup, we drop in on them for a misadventure every 10 or 30 years to see that little has changed except hairline. That is, until the now-doddering trustees encounter the peckerwood sheriff half a century later as he prepares to take over the prison superintendent’s job from a kindly retiring warden (Ned Beatty).
Both Murphy and Lawrence infuse the script (from the team that wrote the curiously interesting Destiny Turns On the Radio) with a bit more nuance than you might expect from a couple incurable standup comics. Lawrence in particular (especially compared to his 1994 “SNL” gig, the one with the infamous “Tic-Tac” line, which just re-ran on Comedy Central) has made some progress toward something like real acting, and Murphy deserves credit for taking on a more challenging role than the remakes he’s done the last few years (look out for Nutty Professor 2 coming soon, perhaps followed by a Doctor Dolittle sequel). But they also, Murphy in particular, indulge their club roots by adding a lot -- a whole lot -- of very contemporary profanity (the score by Wyclef Jean is often anachronistically up-to-date, too), frequently diluting any sympathy for their characters just for the sake of street cred; director Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls; he’s Jonathan Demme’s nephew, if you were wondering) pretty much lets them do what they want. Bouncing through a fairly satisfying plot, the characters evolve little through what is essentially a series of sketches, with mostly cartoonish supporting players, scattered across decades. Only its intent -- to elicit from its stars something more substantive than usual -- and the single funniest entry in the recent spate of end-title outtakes keeps Life from earning lower than: C+
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