The Prince and the Pauper set in modern-day Philadelphia and without the gimmick of the two social opposites being physical duplicates: the princely figure, to the contrary, is a WASP financial wizard and the pauperish one is a ghetto black, and they trade places through no choice of their own, but through the mischievous intervention of the Duke brothers, of Duke & Duke commodities brokerage, in order to settle a wager on the old heredity-vs.-environment debate that one of them has been reading up on in Scientific American. The social consciousness of the premise gives the movie another leg to fall back on whenever the comic leg comes up lame or, more often than not, reaches short of the intended mark. Both legs, however, have gone lame by the time the revenge-scheme is launched against the Dukes, and the movie must go the final third or fourth on its duff. Then again: the Dan Aykroyd character is always less plausible, less sympathetic, less well acted than the Eddie Murphy character, so that the movie is only half a movie even in its better two-thirds or three-fourths. With Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche, and Jamie Lee Curtis; directed by John Landis. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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