Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence are a pair of New Yorkers who have somehow slipped up. Murphy is a small-time grifter who has fallen foul of the neighbourhood mob chief. Lawrence is an accountant who becomes mixed up in a similar mess. Together, they find themselves enrolled in a bootlegging gang down in the Deep South.
Corrupt Sergeant Dillard (Ned Vaughn) nabs the duo and frames them. The sentence is a stiff one: 67 years. For the next seven decades, from the Depression through World War II and the Civil Rights Movement, Rayford Gibson (Eddie Murphy) and Claude Banks (Martin Lawrence) bicker and clown. As America matures into a superpower, the two men rot in a suspiciously happy prison which hardly changes. The unmatched couple trade insults like a foul-mouthed version of Lemmon and Matthau and plot a series of unsuccessful escapes.
Look out for R Lee Ermey as Sergeant Pike. Ermey was the Marine Drill Instructor in Full Metal Jacket. A former drill instructor in the US Marine Corps himself, he turned up on set as technical advisor to the actors, but was so convincing that Stanley Kubrick hired him as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Also check out the sultry Lisa Nicole Carson, better known to television watchers as Renée in Ally McBeal. Director Ted Demme is the man behind Beautiful Girls and is Jonathan Silence Of The Lambs Demme's nephew.
The film's brilliant humour comes from this friendship as we watch Murphy and Lawrence become a kind of bickering Odd Couple.
Film
(1999) 
(4 Star)
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