Bruce Jay Friedman's gear-shifting script and Sidney Poitier's lackluster pacing sink Stir Crazy. Whenever Friedman needs a joke, he takes castration fear out of his pocket: a New York cabbie clamps pliers on the balls of a recalcitrant fare in order to get paid; an inmate confides to Pryor in the prison hospital, "I came in here for a hernia operation, but instead they cut off my nut"; the warden trying to beat Wilder makes him ride an Urban Cowboy motorized bull to no avail—"Him being from the East," rationalizes the warden, "I thought he was a little soft in the crotch." Friedman's getting a little soft in the head if he continually has to go below the belt for a yuk. An abler director than Poitier could have trimmed the fat, shortened scenes, but this is a film where if it takes someone a minute to...