Best Defense (1984)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good movie but grossly overrated

A different way of telling a story

C'mon you can't be serious thinking this is of comedy value...dudely moron is his usual pathetic self...even the women in the cast are taller when he wears elevator shoes...not only does this jerk have to buy all his material he has to pay for the phony laughs as well...the truly funny part of this fiasco was seeing kate "the Body" capshaw in the same scene and bed with dudley doofus...she must have been paid a handsome bonus to appear in this film about non-sense....yes, total disregard for arabs in general ....helen shaver actually had a moment of spark but remained fully clothed for a change...on a scale of bad to worse i'd rate this a minus 20

Brilliant? Um, no. Does the ending more or less blow? Sure. But does it have its moments and does it have a serious pair of balls on it? Yep.Best Defense deserves a (moderately) better reputation than it's been left with. For starters, even though he seems embarrassed to even be IN the movie most of the time, Dudley Moore IS funny in here and has his funny scenes (I miss him). Eddie Murphy (even though his scenes are obviously pasted in) is the 1984 Eddie Murphy that we used to love so much (you can keep the 'Disney' Eddie Murphy of late, thank you) and is worth a few good laughs, and David Rasche (yes... SLEDGE HAMMER!) is a stitch as Jeff (the KGB agent). The scene where David is throwing Dudley all around the bar is worth the price of admission alone (assuming that's a small rental fee for the VHS tape, that is).It's worth a look, if only because it makes moves that few movies (if any) these days have the guts to make - give it a chance - see it drunk if you have to. :)

I cannot believe the appalling "tripe" I'm hearing from some IMDB users about this and other "bottom 100" IMDB movies.After only a few hundred votes, this movie makes it into the bottom 100??? How is that fair? Only a few hundred stuck-up movie critic wannabe's rate this movie and it gets a bottom-of-the-barrel rating?This movie is pretty good, especially when you consider it was one of Eddie Murphy's first movies. It was a little dull, but hardly worse than a 4-6 rating.Please people, let's save the 1-3 ratings for the TRULY horrible movies out there. If you give bad ratings to movies like this, you completely invalidate the entire system. These ratings have to be weighted by the number of people who voted -- you can't take 100 votes and call that comprehensive!!!

Thus movie is sorry in the broadest sense of the word. Paramount wished it wasn't there. Dudley Moore wished he was funny. Eddie Murphy wished he hadn't cried 'I love Iraq! I'm not in this war! I'm from Cleveland!'. The BBC wished it didn't broadcast the pile of trash. Kate Capshaw (Steven Spielberg's wife) wished she wasn't in it (humming the Indiana Jones theme so she must be longing for the Temple of Doom (1984) or something). US government wishes it wasn't involved in Arabia and that Eddie Murphy didn't drive around in a tank in Kuwait. As a gyroscope the movie keeps up its own pity and regret. The story destructs itself. The worst element of the movie is the score: it absolutely keeps on dragging low to the ground and pulls every potential idea of any other collaborator of this sorry project back into oblivion. Not strong, not viril and certainly not penetrating. You wouldn't believe there's actually a novel of this material.A positive thing about the story is that the footage of the DIP-engineering process is alternated with footage from the present (two years later) with Eddie Murphy in a tank cruising Kuwait and Iraqi soil, approaching a climax. Bye bye belly button. Maybe Troma could distribute this more effectively. The only real comedy in this movie comes from the David Rasche. RIP rather than DIP: 2/10