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Stir Crazy
After their first successful teaming in Silver Streak, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor were reunited for the elaborate comic adventure Stir Crazy, an overlong comedy romp that doesn't quite live up to its reputation, primarily due to an overstuffed screenplay, but the stars still make it a worthwhile trip and a sad reminder how much they are missed.
Wilder and Pryor play Skip Donahue and Harry Monroe, respectively. They are BFF's who have been both fired from their jobs and leave town for a fresh start and end up getting arrested for a crime they didn't commit and end up being sent to a prison work farm where their struggle to survive prison life is interrupted by a prison rodeo run by a pair of crooked wardens who are pocketing all of the profits.
Screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman's screenplay takes the situations presented in prison work farm movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Longest Yard and turns them on their ear, providing a welcome canvas for the laughs provided by the stars, a lot of which I'm pretty sure are improvised. The canvas provides a perfect framework for Wilder and Pryor to demonstrate the one-of-a-kind chemistry that they shared onscreen and made the minor problems with the film forgivable. We get most of the scenes we expect like the boys being hassled by the warden and his flying monkey, their taming of the prison monster, and the gay inmate who has a crush on one of them, but it's all played strictly for laughs here, though some of the laughs are a little dated in 2019.
The strongest part of the film is its center, when the guys first arrive at the prison farm and are trying to figure out how to survive. Two guys trying to survive prison life is a palatable enough plot for this movie and director Sidney Poitier makes sure that the laughs provided stay center stage during this part of the movie, but it does lose steam when the guys stop worrying about themselves and start worrying about the crooked wardens and trying to stop what they're doing.
Poitier doesn't tamper too much with the comic gold that is Wilder and Pryor and they do bring the funny. The supporting cast is peppered with several familiar faces including Barry Corbin (doing his patented redneck warden), Georg Stanford Brown, Jonathan Banks, Nicholas Coster, Joel Brooks, Franklyn Ajaye, and, though they share no scenes together, Craig T. Nelson and Jobeth Williams, whose next acting assignments would be playing the parents in Poltergeist. It takes a minute to get going and it loses steam towards the end, but the middle is more than wroth the ride, though it doesn't quite live up to its reputation.
After their first successful teaming in Silver Streak, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor were reunited for the elaborate comic adventure Stir Crazy, an overlong comedy romp that doesn't quite live up to its reputation, primarily due to an overstuffed screenplay, but the stars still make it a worthwhile trip and a sad reminder how much they are missed.
Wilder and Pryor play Skip Donahue and Harry Monroe, respectively. They are BFF's who have been both fired from their jobs and leave town for a fresh start and end up getting arrested for a crime they didn't commit and end up being sent to a prison work farm where their struggle to survive prison life is interrupted by a prison rodeo run by a pair of crooked wardens who are pocketing all of the profits.
Screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman's screenplay takes the situations presented in prison work farm movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Longest Yard and turns them on their ear, providing a welcome canvas for the laughs provided by the stars, a lot of which I'm pretty sure are improvised. The canvas provides a perfect framework for Wilder and Pryor to demonstrate the one-of-a-kind chemistry that they shared onscreen and made the minor problems with the film forgivable. We get most of the scenes we expect like the boys being hassled by the warden and his flying monkey, their taming of the prison monster, and the gay inmate who has a crush on one of them, but it's all played strictly for laughs here, though some of the laughs are a little dated in 2019.
The strongest part of the film is its center, when the guys first arrive at the prison farm and are trying to figure out how to survive. Two guys trying to survive prison life is a palatable enough plot for this movie and director Sidney Poitier makes sure that the laughs provided stay center stage during this part of the movie, but it does lose steam when the guys stop worrying about themselves and start worrying about the crooked wardens and trying to stop what they're doing.
Poitier doesn't tamper too much with the comic gold that is Wilder and Pryor and they do bring the funny. The supporting cast is peppered with several familiar faces including Barry Corbin (doing his patented redneck warden), Georg Stanford Brown, Jonathan Banks, Nicholas Coster, Joel Brooks, Franklyn Ajaye, and, though they share no scenes together, Craig T. Nelson and Jobeth Williams, whose next acting assignments would be playing the parents in Poltergeist. It takes a minute to get going and it loses steam towards the end, but the middle is more than wroth the ride, though it doesn't quite live up to its reputation.