User Reviews

Seeking out bad movies that I missed in my youth is not a regular practice of mine but I did want to see the movie Alan Spencer mentioned in the audio commentaries on the Sledge Hammer DVD boxed sets. Spencer mentioned David Rasche's performance in Best Defense as one of (maybe the only, can't remember) reason he wanted Rasche to play the lead in his police satire sitcom, Sledge Hammer. It is extremely easy to see the connection in the performances.

Rasche plays, Jeff. It's not clear whether or not Jeff is a KGB agent or an industrial spy who buys and sells information to whoever wants to buy it. The movie feels like it comes to an abrupt halt when he's off the screen and everything that happens after that aspect of the story feels painfully anti-climatic. It could be because there's no real action in the third act that makes any sense.

The history of this movie is that it didn't test well at all and in order to try and salvage the project, Eddie Murphy was hired to film separate scenes to sort of jack it up in a comedy sense. The patch in doesn't work. Because Dudley Moore's character is involved with designing a component for tanks, Eddie Murphy plays an Army Lieutenant who is testing (it has to be later right?) the tank, presumably with the component in use. Much of the third act features a back and forth. From flashback to Moore trying to fix the component to flashforward, to Murphy in a situation where said component needs to work. Back and forth, back and forth and in the end, it just stops going back and forth. I guess mentioning this means this review has spoilers.

The movie has a fine cast. They really don't have much to work with which is fairly obvious. Dudley Moore's main comedic contributions is sex jokes and a kind of understated buffoonery throughout. Eddie Murphy in his own scenes come across as improvised jokes in army fatigues and in a tank. This is Murphy in his prime and he's entertaining but if all of his scenes were together in their own short film and not spliced in, it would be more enjoyable though Murphy has been better and done better. If I want to see old Eddie Murphy footage, I wouldn't watch this, I'd watch SNL reruns, Beverly Hills Cop, and 48 hrs.

When looking for a laugh, aside from Moore and Murphy, there's just Rasche whose Jeff character is an excitable psychotic. He commands the scenes he's in which isn't difficult since most of them feature Dudley Moore who is like the straight man in a comedy routine.

The movie really is only worth seeing for Rasche's performance and that's especially true for Sledge Hammer fans. I like most things the Second City alumnis were involved in. Raschi was a member in the 70's and Murphy was briefly in the 80's. Moore was great in Pete and Dud/Derek and Clive. They could've all been better served with a better script but there doesn't look like there's much for them to work with outside what they themselves could bring to their roles.

This movie is yet another in a line of films which bags on the American defense system. Not that I am opposed to this, after all, it's a free country, but they were very popular in the eighties, during the peak of the cold war, showing the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the American military as Chaplin-like buffoons unaware of everything. This is another "Ishtar" and it came out a few years earlier. Two big stars in each film who were box office draws (Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in "Ishtar" and Eddie Murphy and Dudley Moore in "Best Defense") and people getting tricked into thinking each film will be entertaining. "Best Defense" is based on a great book "Easy and Hard Ways Out" by Robert Grossbach. The book centers almost entirely on the defense lab and will also go back and forth to show an overseas jet pilot named "Buchfarer" about to go on a mission with a new jet plane. In the film, Eddie Murphy, as "Landry", is the "Buchfarer" character and instead of a jet, it's a tank. Like the book, the film deals with two time parallels: the present and the past; the past dealing with the defense lab technical corporation as they are rushing a component that makes the "war machine" work so that it can get out quickly - and thus putting the future unknown soldier who will one day run this machine ("Buchfarer" and then "Landry") in jeopardy. The book does it very well (and there is a very unhappy ending, unlike the movie); the movie does it horribly. And in the book, the entire plot centers on the tech fighting to fix this machine, knowing that it won't work and the corporation wanting to get it out; meanwhile, the movie has so many sup-plots that this basic premise of the book is lost. Murphy's scenes seem contrived and pasted, his talent totally wasted and it showed folks back in those days, after "48 hours", "Trading Places", and "Beverly Hills Cop", that he was a mere mortal. Dudley Moore plays the most unlikeable character I have ever seen on film. All I can say is, read the book. There are so many classic characters, like a guy who literally lives in the corporation's bathroom, because he'd been fired the year before, and other classic situations, kind of a "M*A*S*H" in America; but the movie, having to make up for time, adds a silly side-story about the Russians and a stolen floppy disc. This might be one of the worst movies ever made. It just doesn't flow, it isn't fun to watch, and there is no point at all. One day maybe they'll do a faithful remake of the Grossbach novel, which you can find on the internet (don't be tricked by the fact that the novel is now called "Best Defense"). Director Willard Huck (I can't spell the man's last name) has ruined this book like he would turn out ruining a great comic book character, "Howard the Duck", a few years later. Willard is good friends with some great filmmakers: Lucas, Spielberg, etc., and is a good writer, but as a director he, like this film, comes up very, very, very short.

i'm not sure how else to say it.the above summary pretty much describes my feelings on this movie.add to that,lots of crude language for no apparent reason,and you have the recipe for a bad movie.there is some language that Christians might be offended by.***possible minor spoiler***Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy appear in this movie,but as far as i know,they don't share any scenes together.at least they didn't through the forty minutes i was able to watch before quitting.***end of spoiler***.I found Murphy more annoying than anything,and Moore didn't really leave much of an impression at all.in all pretty much a waste of time.pretty close to awful,in fact.for me,Best Defense is a 2/10