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The two get in big bad trouble fast in Mississippi because neither of them seems quite to get what's going on in the Jim Crow South. So it's to the South they go, but this is also the moment the film first displays its chronically slipshod tendencies. (The reason: Ray has picked his pocket.) Spanky gives them a choice: Go south to pick up a booze shipment, or go swimming with the help of 30 yards of tightly wound rope. Ray (Murphy) is the hustler con man, pickpocket, bootlegger, thief who in the Harlem high renaissance of 1932 runs afoul of nightclub owner Spanky Johnson on the same night that good-soldier workingman Claude (Lawrence) loses his money and can't pay his bill. They don't let this is their triumph, and the movie's signal accomplishment a monstrous system turn them into monsters. They remain committed to their ideal of freedom and to each other though they have a spat and don't talk for 10 years and they try this thing and that. It has a strain of nobility to it: Claude and Ray never give up. In that sense it is of a piece with other African American odysseys of survival over the long haul, through the thick and thin of an ugly history, like "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" or "Driving Miss Daisy." John Singleton would use it as a grenade.īut this director, Ted Demme, turns Murphy's own original story, in its best aspect, into an essay on endurance and dignity. Two innocent black men, railroaded into a brutal penal farm system, tormented not merely by the bulls, the heat, the savagery of the place, but also by what could have been theirs and never was? Spike Lee would turn it into a napalm strike on the body politic. Yet the movie is surprisingly free of rancor and hatred. And they find it's a road that goes nowhere very slowly, as the movie chronicles their 60 years behind the gun line. 8 of the Mississippi State Prison archipelago, a Devil's Island in the Delta where the two are consigned in 1932 after a casual frame-up by a racist lawman. "Life," the new Eddie Murphy-Martin Lawrence film, feels as if it's inspired by the old "Road" comedies of Crosby and Hope. Life grossed $63 million at the domestic box office, to end the year the 34th highest grossing movie of the year.Eddie Murphy, right, and Martin Lawrence are in it for the long haul in "Life." I think this is probably Murphy's last good comedy!! It's not a laugh riot, but it's a seriously touching movie. Murphy and Lawrence had genuine chemistry and some out takes and ad libs are actually in the movie. I usually watch this every couple of years. I enjoy this movie, and consider it to be under rated. Ned Beatty (Deliverance) has a small but important role. 7 years ago, Murphy was a huge star, and Murphy was relatively unknown. This reteams Murphy with his Boomerang costar, Martin Lawrence. This is the last movie starring Eddie Murphy, that I chose to go see at the cinema!! That is not counting voice work, I went to see with my kids. Plot In A Paragraph: In 1932, two strangers (Murphy and Lawrence) are wrongfully convicted and develop a strong friendship in prison that lasts them through the 20th century. Continuing my plan to watch every Eddie Murphy movie in order, I come to Life (1999)
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