Best Defense

This was the "other" 1984 movie from the husband and wife writing/producing/directing team of Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck. These two must have gotten this project going solely off being hired by their buddy George Lucas to write Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, not for their work on either script. Best Defense is possibly the worst studio release of the great movie year 1984. It stars Dudley Moore, the gifted British comedian who became a surprise leading man after the runaway success of Blake Edwards' 10 in 1979. Now a ubiquitous '80s movie star, attaching Moore to a project could get pretty much any picture green-lit.

Moore plays Wylie Cooper, a computer engineer who is lazy and terrible at his job. The character is introduced in a scene where he unsuccessfully tries to initiate morning sex with his disinterested wife (Kate Capshaw) and then ogles his female coworker (Helen Shaver) like a thirteen-year-old boy when he should be concentrating on testing a targeting system for the United States Army, the failure of which will put the defense contractor company he works for out of business. He goes on to have top-secret plans passed to him by a more skilled engineer (Tom Noonan), which will solve a problem he wasn't smart enough to figure out himself, so his buddy at the company (George Dzundza) convinces him to pass them off as his own. That's the setup for the "hero" of this movie. As the plot develops, Cooper displays spectacular feats of cowardice, tries to cheat on his shrewish wife, and attempts to sell the company's targeting system plans to the KGB.

All of this is executed with the full faith and confidence that any character Moore plays will be loved unconditionally by the audience, even if playing a loser in the middle of a mid-life crisis, as in 10, or a hopeless drunk, like in Arthur). Of course, audiences had proved by this point in the '80s that this belief that Moore could do no wrong was not the case (see the Box-office returns for the three films he made prior to this one, Six Weeks, Lovesick, and Romantic Comedy). Still, that didn't prevent him from starring in three movies this year—Blake Edwards' Mickey and Maude, where he knocks up his wife and mistress at the same time and attempts to keep it a secret even when they go into labor at the same hospital, the remake of Unfaithfully Yours where he plays a cuckold composer who plots to murder his own unfaithful wife, and the worst movie of his entire career, Best Defense.

Huyck and Katz based the "plot" of this lazy, sloppy pictre on Robert Grossbach's dark and cynical Vietnam-era novel Easy and Hard Ways Out. As a satire of military hardware and the American Military mindset, the resulting film ended up much closer to Deal of the Century than WarGames. Part of the reason Moore's character doesn't stand out like the unbelievably shitty dirtbag he is is because every other character in the picture, from his coworkers to his bosses to his family, is equally incompetent and awful. If the point is to mock the arms industry, you have to do it in ways that actually mock the way people in the arms industry behave, not the way actors and movie executives behave.

I have no idea why practically every line of dialogue Katz and Huyck wrote after the 1970s feels like it was penned by a horny, fart-lovin' adolescent virgin, but I'm equally baffled by the fact that studios paid them handsomely multiple times to write such dreck. Best Defense attempts one broad comical set piece after another, but as a director, Huyck is no Blake Edwards. By this point, way too many people had seen Edward's slapstick approach to comedies with adult themes and thought, "Hell, anyone can do that!" Well, no, they really can't. And the proof is all the terrible movies like this that attempted to do what Edwards himself could only pull off about half the time.

The film had such disastrous test screenings that the folks at Paramount Pictures hit upon the bright idea of retooling it into a two-lead picture by adding rising comedy star Eddie Murphy into the mix. After all, if they could shoe-horned the hot young comedian into the story, they might be able to make it both funnier and more appealing to a broader audience. Buddy comedies were really popular, and none more so than Paramount's recent hits 48 Hrs. and Trading Places (both of which starred Murphy). At the time, Murphy was best known for keeping Saturday Night Live afloat almost single-handly during the years the show's co-creator Dick Ebersol was attempting to transform SNL into something that could survive the departure of its original cast and producer, Lorne Michaels.

Murphy had made the successful jump to high-performing movies, though both of his hit films paired him with an established star. But hey, Moore was not only an established star, he was the hottest thing in movie comedy! Of course, in both his prior films, Murphy actually got to act with his top-billed co-stars. In Trading Places, his story runs parallel to Dan Aykroyd's, but the joy of that movie is seeing them come together in the third act. In the hastily written scenes that shoehorned him into this already completed picture, he is basically alone, stuck in a tank with little to work off, apart from two fake Arbab sidekicks.

Murphy plays Lieutenant T.M. Landry, the unfortunate tank commander sent to Kuwait to demonstrate America's latest battle tank, the "XM-10 Annihilator," which has been equipped with Willie Cooper's ineffectual targeting system. These Kuwait scenes take place in 1984, two years after the events in the main storyline. The conceit is that every time Moore's Cooper wonders aloud what it will be like for the eventual commander of a tank rigged with his ineffectual guidance system, we wipe to Murphy's Landry two years in the future, living out that reality. The two characters don't exist in the same timeline, though there was a final scene filmed where they meet that was determined not to add anything of value to the movie, and it, too, hit the cutting room floor).

The filmmakers and studio execs basically took a completed but terribly unfunny comedy, hired Murphy, flew him to Israel, stuck him in a tank, and said, "OK, be funny." Then, to make room for these new sequences and keep the running time mercifully short, they cut a bunch of "plot" scenes from the original version, making the entire enterprise even more challenging to enjoy. The whole project is surely an embracement to all involved. Shaver, Dzundza, Noonan, and David Rasche (who plays a KGB agent) are all gifted actors who turn in terrible performances here. Moore and Capshaw are embarrassingly awful. Murphy is the only participant who came out unscathed. The comedian turned his well-paid "Strategic Guest Star" turn (that's how he's billed in the film and on the poster) into a punchline.

Best Defense is best remembered for Murphy's mention of it in his hilarious monologue when he returned to host the 1984 SNL Christmas show just after the release of Beverly Hills Cop. Explaining why he was back hosting so soon after leaving the show, Murphy said, "Best Defense turned out to be the worst movie ever done in the history of anything, and all of a sudden, I wasn't that hot no more. So, I called up the producer of Saturday Night Live, and I go, 'Um, you still got my dressing room?'" But the unbridled success of Beverly Hills Cop eclipsed this picture and relegated it to the discard bin of celluloid history, sitting on streamers only for Eddie Murphy completionists and people like me who run 1984 movie marathons.