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.