Life Movie Review: Hard Time in the Jim Crow South

First published in The Connecticut College Voice on 23 April 1999. I have made some minor editorial adjustments, although nothing that affects the content of the review.

Two black men, wrongfully accused of murder in Mississippi in the 1920’s, spend sixty-five years in prison. Sounds like the workings of a film about racial injustice? Perhaps the hardships of the prison farms in the deep south? Not quite. Instead what we have is a comedy-drama about a mismatched pair of New York City boys forming an unlikely friendship during a life prison sentence.

Life is directed by Ted Demme and stars Eddie Murphy as Ray and Martin Lawrence as Claude – the two men whose luck runs out about twenty-five minutes into the film. As it happens Ray and Claude find themselves driving to Mississippi to haul a truckload of booze back to the big city. In a late night celebration with their fresh wad of cash, Ray loses everything he has (including a Sterling silver pocket watch that was a gift from his father) to a cheating gambler (Clarence Williams III). As their luck would have it, the gambler’s dead body falls in their laps outside and as Ray is looking for his watch, he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

The Wolfman Movie Review

This review is based on the extended cut version.

Can anyone remember the last time Anthony Hopkins made a film that didn’t look like a complete sellout? In the last decade or so he’s probably made one film that’s worth watching – The World’s Fastest Indian. You should seriously give it a look because The Wolfman is anything but worthy of two of hours of your time.

The Wolfman is director Joe Johnston’s attempt at bringing back that old Hollywood monster movie feeling. He’s trying to invoke nostalgia from the appearance of the Universal logo, which is a retooling of the one used in 1941, when Lon Chaney, Jr. donned the wolf makeup and chased Claude Rains around the backlot. It has an opening scene that suggests we might be in for a wonderfully campy ride, with a bombastic and ridiculous musical score, fast cuts of wolf’s claws, growling and snarling on the soundtrack and just enough dripping blood from the victim to be scary without tipping the balance toward gruesome.