Flak Magazine: Review of Life, 4-14-99

Fewer titles are riskier than Life because few titles could set up higher expectations or suggest greater things. Ted Demme’s film of that name suffers terribly from the unavoidable implications, because they draw unneeded attention to a host of the movie’s inadequacies.

Most obvious is the film’s bizarre pacing; it samples from four different periods in the shared history of Ray (Eddie Murphy) and Claude (Martin Lawrence)–their meeting, arrest and life imprisonment; their cultivation of a baseball team 10 years into their sentence; the theft of a pie 35 years into their sentence (no, seriously); and their final days in the pen, 65 years later.

The story would work as well broken into two segments, or three, or five. The steep and sudden passages of time only function as a non-humorous joke–Ray and Claude are so upset at one another that they don’t speak for the 25 years between the middle segments, and then bond over pie–and a showcase for the make-up talents of Rick Baker, who transforms the comedians into 70- and 90-year-olds. There’s no telling if any other set-up would be better, but the one the screenwriters and Demme have chosen is poor.

Demme has shown a deft hand in the past–his The Ref was one of the better ensemble comedies of its time. But here, everything is such a muddle, demonstrated particularly when Ray and Claude are able to clear their names of the crime for which they were falsely imprisoned: They convince the prison superintendent, who has the power to pardon them…but he dies on the toilet moments later.

This crystallizes the movie’s problems of tone. Is it a comedy? It’s joke-filled, but only intermittently funny, and pretty heavy for the class of comedy it most resembles. Is it a drama? There’s no real growth or character development, no statement that it makes. Is it a social problems film? You’d think it would have to have some unified comment on race issues or justice system maladies, but none of these things develop from the injustices to which it subjects its protagonists–it’s practically offensive in its calculated non-offensiveness.

Which leaves…what? And then you realize: it’s a vanity piece. All of the showboating that Murphy and Lawrence do, all the stuff that’s not really funny–they’re supposed to be acting. Showing range. Emotions. It doesn’t work, no way no how, and as soon as you realize this, you’ll have no further use for the movie. It apparently wants to stir the soul, but it doesn’t. Demme may intend for Life to be an appeal to the universal, but it’s really just another comedy aiming no higher than the common denominator.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)