Best Defense (1984)

Directed by Willard Huyck. Starring Dudley Moore, Helen Shaver, Kate Capshaw, George Dzundza, Eddie Murphy, David Rasche, Mark Arnott, Peter Michael Goetz, Matthew Laurence, Christopher Maher, Tom Noonan, Joel Polis. [R]

A sorry, aimless engineer (Moore) who’s about to lose his job stumbles upon secret plans that will save his project, his livelihood, and his company, drastically changing his life in the process. Anemic, utterly witless “comedy” just sits up there on the screen, immovable and uninvolving, and the actors either seem half-asleep or make gasping, thrashing efforts to force a chuckle with their outlandish behavior. Released near the peak of Murphy’s stardom, his scenes don’t even take place in the same year or on the same continent as everything else; he’s barely in it (aptly billed as a “strategic guest star” in the credits), and is as desperately unfunny as the rest. Meanwhile, Moore (who was never as funny a solo player as he was paired up with Peter Cook) plays a thoroughly unlikable “hero” who spends about half the movie trying to cheat on his wife with his attractive boss. You know it’s a really bad movie when the most memorable bit is hearing Capshaw hum the Indiana Jones theme while waiting in a car.

11/100