This movie may appear to be a family movie, but yet Richard Pryor's Braxton character is clearly not a family man. He swears and yells at children, slaps them, teaches them strip poker and is constantly smoking stogies.I found myself really enjoying this movie though. There are quite a few laugh out loud moments. I especially liked when the Miss Perry character told Braxton to be careful with his cigar because he might set himself on fire!The movie even features comedian Paul Mooney in a small cameo at the beginning.

Bustin' Loose (1981)*** (out of 4)Richard Pryor plays a con man who is blackmailed by his probation officer into taking eight troubled kids on a bus trip from Philadelphia to Seattle. Having been made in a politically incorrect time and featuring Pryor with troubled kids means you're going to have a great load of laughs but the film also has a heart of gold but more on this in a bit. As for pure laughs this is probably the best film I've seen from Pryor, although Moving is still my favorite movie of his due to it just being a personal favorite. This movie here features non-stop laughs from start to finish and it really gives Pryor a chance to act and he proves to be very reliable here. Pryor does a great job with the comedy and really delivers the jokes but what's most refreshing is seeing how well he does with the more dramatic moments. The film has a heart of gold but I think there are a few too many tender scenes meant to make the viewer get tears in their eyes. A lot of these dramatic scenes are pretty heartfelt but I think there are just too many of them. Pryor handles all of this very well though. Cicely Tyson plays the woman trying to save the kids and she's does a good job, although the romantic subplot with Pryor is pretty weak. There are numerous great scenes in the film including a great sequence where Pryor runs into the KKK but the highlight of the movie is certainly the scene where Pryor is driving the bus and three of the kids, acting like thugs, come up and start messing with him.

In reviewing African-Americans in film in chronological order for Black History Month, we're now at 1981 with Bustin' Loose. In this one, Richard Pryor is a small-time crook who gets a chance at redemption when his parole officer asks him to drive a bus of troubled children and his fiancée (Cicely Tyson) across country from Philadelphia to Seattle on the way to Tyson's family farm. That obviously doesn't sound like a hilarious comedy and there are indeed some scenes Pryor has with some of the kids that expresses more of his dramatic abilities, as heartfelt as some of those scenes may be. There's still some of his unique comic talents here that may make you glad you gave this one a shot like his attempted con of several TV sets in a bogus delivery truck or his fooling the Ku Klux Klan into pushing the bus out of a mud-hole because they think all the kids in it are blind! Then there's his cowboy disguise with fake accent near the end that made me laugh pretty hard. Ms. Tyson, normally a dramatic actress, has a few humorous moments of her own that puts her in a new light. Threatens to lose steam after a while but all in all, Bustin' Loose is nothing Mr. Pryor had to be ashamed about especially since he thought up the story and was co-producer. P.S. It was here that he set himself on fire when he freebased on cocaine.

I love Richard Pryor, but this particular project obviously didn't pan out. He has some funny scenes, but altogether he seems humiliated to be in the movie. This would've worked out better, if it were just an after-school special. The problem is it tries to be a comedy, but the tone is way too uneven. The tone is right in the first half, when Pryor is a slick con man with a short temper. I really got a kick out of the courtroom scene, in which he begs to be sentenced for 5 years in jail, purposely to do community service instead. But once the film takes a serious turn, it never recovers. That's when the story becomes sappy, sentimental and manipulative. Sure, it's quite touching when Pryor begins to like the kids and he even teaches them lessons on life, but I'm just being manipulated by the director. I'm a peer educator, I've worked with dysfunctional children--they don't become nice that easily! Once that kid is corrupted, it takes a lot more than a simple pep talk to turn him/her into a decent, upstanding citizen. So the plot is expectedly predictable. I'm sure some will think much better of the film, since Pryor shows his more serious side. In this particular film, he should've stuck to comedy. In every scene where he gets emotional, his voice rises to a comic pitch and it ruins the moments. But as I said, he was probably humiliated to be in the movie and I can't judge him as a lousy dramatic actor, simply from his work in this particular film. I haven't seen it yet, but he made a movie in the 70s with Paul Schraeder, co-starring with Harvey Keitel, called "Blue Collar" in which he gave a dramatic performance. He may have been good in that film. And last but not least, the soundtrack is terrible! I understand music like that was typical of the movies of the 70s and early 80s, but I wanted to shoot myself every time I heard the music! It just dampened the mood of every scene, as if the film wasn't uneven enough! If you want to see Richard Pryor at his best, check out one of his concert films. I compare how much I laughed when watching his first concert film and how much I laughed during "Bustin' Loose," and there's a huge difference. The film has its moments, and is not altogether terrible, but it's only OK and very forgettable. My score: 5 (out of 10)