(In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) I’m glad I read about Best Defense’s troubled production before writing this review, because it turns out that what I liked best about it are almost accidental consequences of an attempt to save the film from a critical savaging. From the get-go, the film offers two timelines: One, in 1982, with a bumbling engineer trying to perfect a piece of military equipment, and another in 1984 of a soldier having to use the equipment in a military engagement. Already, this dual-timeline structure is far more interesting than the norm. But as it turns out, the 1984 subplot was added in reshoots when the 1982 scenes proved too terrible to exist by themselves. In that, at least, the studio acknowledged reality. Unexplainably relying on Dudley Moore as a protagonist (the more I see of Moore’s movies, the less I like his comic persona), the bulk of Best Defense tries to convince us that it’s worth cheering for an incompetent, lecherous would-be-adulterous idiot. (Has Moore played anything else?) Needless to say, this has aged poorly these days, especially during an American administration that has nakedly shown the consequences of incompetence. If you can manage to get over his performance, the film gets far more interesting when it plays with its dual timelines, the actions of 1982 having consequences in 1984, as none other than Eddie Murphy (then exploding as a megastar, and clearly funnier than Moore, even in showboating) playing the soldier struggling with the engineer-designed equipment. Amusingly enough, the film anticipates the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait eight years before it happened—although let’s not see in this anything but a lucky coincidence. The result is a bit of a mess—an intriguing structure that was bolted upon a far less interesting film. Murphy escapes from the film mostly intact, along with Kate Capshaw as the voice of reason to man-child Moore. Best Defense is interesting but for all the wrong reasons—and I’m not going to recommend it to any unsuspecting audience.
