Nati con la camicia [Go for It] (1983)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) Since Bud Spencer and Terence Hill comedies were a staple of French-Canadian TV when I was a kid, I must have seen Go for It as a boy—and not knowing that this would be one of the last screen appearances for the duo. It is, at least, one of the bigger-budgeted of their films: enough for the Italian production crew to shoot it in Sunny Miami (although there are mountains at some point… in Florida), and for the plot (in which two not-so-respectable men are mistaken for secret agents) to string along a series of large-scale physical gags. Conceptually, some of the stuff is funny—but it’s not quite executed well enough to be even remotely plausible. (A trailer-tractor sequence, in particular, is even more inept than the rest.) As a spy film parody of sorts, Go for It takes a while to get going and it doesn’t end on much of a high note. Fortunately, Spencer and Hill have charm and a good comic rapport… but it’s not enough to overcome an air of facility and over-familiarity with the proceedings. Go for it ends up being a thoroughly mixed bag: funny in spots, implausible most of the time, and a bit cheap for the rest of it.