Movie Reviews : The Laughs Have Escaped From ‘Buy & Cell’ Prison

“Buy & Cell” (selected theaters) is such a labored prison comedy that watching it is like serving a life sentence on the chain gang without chance of parole.

Robert Carradine stars as a Wall Street investment broker framed by his boss (Michael Goodwin) for inside trading and embezzling. Sent up for 13 years in addition to being fined $200 million (!), a stunned Carradine reconnoiters and turns a bunch of hard-case cons (Ben Vereen, Tony Plana, Rowdy Roddy Piper, etc.) into financial whiz kids.

There’s actually a point to Carradine’s scheme, but it hardly matters because there’s so much talk and so little energy in “Buy & Cell” that the film quickly lapses into a preposterous bore.

Only Michael Winslow, whose way with vocal sound effects has been the bright spot in the progressively awful “Police Academy” series, has a chance to have some fun as Carradine’s endlessly enterprising cellmate. Malcolm McDowell does his familiar nasty turn as the prison’s warden, and Fred Travalena, such a terrific impressionist, is stuck playing a totally unfunny psycho.

The script, credited to Ken Krauss and Merrin Holt, would have had to undergo about five rewrites to have had even a prayer of succeeding. Director Robert Boris’ previous “Oxford Blues” wasn’t much, but it looms as a masterpiece in comparison to this silly fizzle.

Amazingly, “Buy & Cell” (rated R for language), which was filmed in Empire Studios in Rome, was produced by the highly experienced Frank Yablans, former chief executive officer of MGM/UA and former president of Paramount.