Metacritic reviews

Demme (Monument Ave.) brings a sure hand with pace and structure to the soft-at-heart script by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, allowing Murphy, Lawrence and company to sit back and focus on the job at hand -- making us laugh.

Gracefully bittersweet and balanced. [16 April 1999, Calendar, p.F-1]

No show-business tradition is sturdier than the two-man comedy team, and no contemporary stars are better suited to the format than Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. Pairing them was a terrific idea.

Lawrence and Murphy make an entertaining team. And they are surrounded by a supporting cast that makes the prison setting more pleasant than it has any right to be.

Careens from decade to decade, and from relative dramatic realism to frequent hilarity, in often-winning fashion.

If it's difficult to find straight laughs in a colorblind prison movie (It's difficult enough to find a colorblind prison movie), finding straight laughs in a black one is almost impossible.

The result is a movie that's both odd and mediocre: not as bad as doing hard time, but not a particularly good time, either.

Life desperately wants to let Murphy and Lawrence be actors, but it can't imagine them as anything more than rowdy showmen. That's a kind of prison as well.

Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence are back together and give both of their careers some new life in this sentimental comedy.

Sluggish, laugh-free comedy (or is it an ineffectual drama?).