Best Defense

1984 film by Willard Huyck
the film

Best Defense is a 1984 American action comedy film, starring Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy. The original music score was composed by Patrick Williams. The film's preview screenings were received poorly, and the studio suggested filming a role for Eddie Murphy, who was at the peak of his popularity. Murphy's part was almost completely unconnected from the rest of the film, and his character never even comes into contact with any of the main cast. There had been a scene filmed during the re shoots which featured Moore and Murphy's characters meeting, but it was cut from the film. Additionally, several other scenes that were important to the original plot were cut in order to fit the newly shot scenes with Murphy into the film, thus contributing to the film's poor reception and reputation as a "meandering mess."

The movie received negative reviews from critics. On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 29 out of 100, based on eight critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". It opened strong at #2 behind Ghostbusters with $7.8 million but quickly lost steam, mostly due to poor word of mouth, and grossed a disappointing $19.2 million. It was nominated for a Stinkers Bad Movie Awards for Worst Picture, losing to Dune. When Murphy hosted Saturday Night Live about five months after the film was released, he admitted in his opening monologue that he knew the film was awful and did it for the money: "After I did 48 Hours and Trading Places, all these scripts started coming from everywhere, and I picked up a script called Best Defense. There’s a movie that sucked real bad! At first, I wasn’t going to do it because I read the script, and I felt like I was an actor at first. But the money they gave me to do Best Defense, y’all would have done Best Defense too, OK? I was like, 'What?! How dare you give me a script like this! Oh, that much money? Let’s go!' 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 dressin’ room?'"