THE AISLE SEAT - "LIFE"
by Mike McGranaghan
The opening moments of Life have a lot of promise. It would have been easy for stars Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence to team up for a raunchy, profanity-filled comedy of attitude. Yet here they are in a period piece - a sentimental character study set in 1932 Mississippi, no less. And rather than capitalizing on their smart-alec personas, both men work hard to give actual performances. Sadly, their efforts are wasted as Life becomes a tediously familiar paean to lifelong friendship.
Murphy plays Ray, a street-smart hustler, and Lawrence plays a mild-mannered bank teller named Claude. Both men run afoul of a Harlem gangster and, as penance, are assigned to transport bootlegged liquor to Mississippi. Once there, they are framed for murder by corrupt white cops and sentenced to life in a state prison facility. Ray and Claude do not initially like each other, but as the decades pass, they become closer. As old men, they hatch a scheme to finally escape their confines.
Although there's a potentially compelling idea in there somewhere, Life is content to just drag out a lot of cliches. Ray and Claude hate each other, then find a bond over the passage of time. Ray's prized possession (a watch his father gave him) is taken, only to reappear decades later in a very predictable manner. All the prison cliches are there, too, including the one about inmates who want to force sex upon other inmates. (Incidentally, the poster for this film depicts two gigantic men sitting with their arms around a very nervous-looking Murphy and Lawrence; has a movie poster ever so blatantly suggested anal rape?)
Even worse than the cliches are the little subplots that dangle around the edges of the picture. For instance, there's a whole chunk of the movie devoted to a mute baseball star (Bokeem Woodbine) who gets paroled to play in a Negro League team. I'm not sure what this has to do with the friendship between Ray and Claude. It seems thrown in to fill up time, as does a revenge scenario near the end. In more than one way, this movie doesn't seem to have a clue what it wants to be. Different ideas are introduced, then quickly dropped.
Since this is a Martin Lawrence/Eddie Murphy vehicle, the flaws would be easy to overlook if the movie was fall-down funny, which it is not. I did get a few laughs here and there, but this is really more of a character study than a comedy. You get long, slow scenes of the stars cavorting around in old-age makeup, punctuated by the occasional burst of feuding in which someone tells someone else to go perform a rude act upon himself. Anyone walking in expecting a high-concept comedy will probably be disappointed by how seriously the film takes itself. Here's a bad sign: the biggest laugh comes in one of the end credit outtakes, where Murphy's cell phone rings in the middle of a scene. He picks it up and says, "Yeah, I know it's 1932. I'm the first person ever to have one of these things."
Life (directed by the gifted Ted Demme) does have some moments of ambition, and Murphy and Lawrence do show some depth in their performances. If the script had been a lot better, their acting might really have been spectacular. As it is, they scramble futilely to bring some much-needed life to Life.
(
out of four)
Return
to the Film Page
