Review of Best Defense

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.