Reviews & Ratings for
Life More at IMDbPro »

An entertaining comedy that deals very elusively with the uncomfortable material that forms the foundation of its plot., 26 April 2002

Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

(spoilers) Life is a perfect example of the type of film that attempts to force a smile onto unhappy material, because the movie is so eager to amuse the audience that it completely forgets the racism and hatred that led to the introduction of its conflict. By the end of the film, its true that we are happy to see Ray and Claude finally free and enjoying a baseball game, but the film would have you forget that they are decrepit old men in their 90s who have basically spent their entire lives in prison because of racism. Their entire lives have been taken away, but the movie wants us to forget about that and get a good laugh from their relentless bickering and things like Claude getting one of his toes stuck in the bottle.

Luckily, Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence work so well together on screen that the comedy that we get from their interaction does, in fact, achieve this strange goal that the movie strives for the whole time. They are both undeniably funny guys, so the comedy in the film is unmistakable, but it's interesting to consider the magnitude with which the painful prejudices that the movie deals with are ignored in favor of what is, at many parts, little more than slapstick comedy.

In the movie's defense, however, it is a good comedy once the ignorance of the racial element is removed, and even when that portion of the film's components is considered, it still manages to walk the fine line between comedy and drama, although just barely. The film manages to avoid the all too common mistake of having the main character(s) fall into masses of trouble by sheer stupidity (which is, admittedly, more a problem in romantic comedies than in films like this). Ray and Claude are both not the most upstanding of citizens when we first meet them, but it seems that they are each on the verge of turning their lives around, to some extent at least, when they get framed for a murder. Instead of picking pockets, Ray gets robbed at a poker game, and Claude gets stuck with Ray on a bootlegging trip to avoid the wrath of some powerful gangster.

The man who cheated at the poker game and took all of Ray's money and his father's watch is found dead (by Ray and Claude, as it were), so while Ray is going through the dead man's pockets trying to find his watch, they are approached by a bunch of rednecks (whose inbred appearances are rivaled only by the subhumans in the Gator Bait films), who decide that they are doing a good deed by bringing the two black guys downtown. Thus begins Ray's and Claude's REAL troubles, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to prove their innocence and get their lives back.

The majority of the film takes place in prison, spanning decades of wrongful imprisonment for Ray and Claude and introducing several interesting and amusing characters just long enough to affect us as several of them disappear from the film in a sequence of elliptical editing that does not seem to fit with the rest of the movie. There are several escape attempts, many of which are there entirely for comic relief (Ray would not have even been able to get into and fly a plane, much less survive that fiery crash), in which the film desperately tries to be an even more comic version of the vastly superior Cool Hand Luke. Unfortunately, Ray Gibson and Claude Banks COMBINED do not even come close to Paul Newman's remarkably memorable Luke Jackson. They don't match the character, the ingeniousness of the escape attempts, or the comic appeal, of which there was virtually none at many points.

On the other hand, it's obvious that this is not a film that is to be taken to seriously. Walk into any video store in the world and you will find Life in the comedy section, because that is the type of film that it sets out to be, and that is what it becomes. In that sense, the film succeeds on many levels. Martin Lawrence and Edie Murphy work very well on the screen, the comedy is unmistakable, and we even get a satisfactory ending to such minor subplots as the theft of Ray's father's watch (and, incidentally, his and Claude's wrongful imprisonment), but it all comes down to the film asking us to ignore too much material (such as, for example, the ultimate fate of the nice white man who shot another white man to protect a couple of black convicts, as well as things like why there is a nice old lady living in a cute little house literally within pie-sniffing distance of the prison camp, and with no fences in between). It cannot be denied that the movie does address at several points the racism involved, but it still makes every effort to remain a comedy, and it succeeds at that, but the conflict between drama and comedy is not resolved, leaving us amused but p***ed off.

This delicate balance between drama and comedy can be done successfully, one has only to watch a film like Life Is Beautiful to see it done nearly flawlessly, but that is because that film USED the comedy in order to enhance the drama involved. The comedy made Guido an immensely likable character, which made us root for him much more and made us ultimately more affected by his misfortunes. In the case of Life, no one seems to want to put in that much effort. We get a good comedy that is riddled with the horrible affects of racism, with the unfortunate result that we get lots of good laughs throughout the film, but feel guilty afterward when we consider the events that led to it.

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