Wally Karue (Richard Pryor) is blind, but acts like he can see because he doesn’t want the world to view him as handicapped. Dave Lyons (Gene Wilder) is deaf, but thanks to his days as a New York actor he’s a skilled lip reader who can mostly manage to conceal his ailment from the majority of society. At first the two can’t stand one another, but one thing quickly leads to another and next thing you know they’re the best of friends.

When Wally’s bookie is murdered by the psychopathic Kirgo and Eve (Kevin Spacey and Joan Severance) the pair suddenly find themselves the prime suspects for committing the crime. Forced to go on the lam, the duo are suddenly mixed up in an international caper involving a valuable gold coin and a mysterious mastermind named Sutherland (Anthony Zerbe), and it will take all of their combined sensory skills to clear their respective names and bring the real villains to justice.

CRITIQUE

Made nine years after Stir Crazy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil reunites stars Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, both having spent nearly an entire decade battling personal and family problems that would in many ways definite the rest of the respective careers (Pryor’s battles with cocaine addiction and against MS; Wilder’s failed attempts to have children with wife Gilda Radner and then her subsequent ordeals fighting Ovarian Cancer). The picture was partly written by Wilder (along with four other writers) and also saw the pair rope back in Silver Streak director Arthur Hiller to helm things, the movie itself a high-concept tightrope act that was more slapstick in nature than either of the two actor’s previous adventures together.

Make no bones about it, See No Evil, Hear No Evil does not work. The story is a convoluted mess that makes little to no sense (even less so than Stir Crazy, which if you think about it is really saying something), the central mystery a shockingly lazy one that goes absolutely nowhere. The cold coin is a pointless McGuffin meaning next to nothing, while Spacey and Severance’s villains are so one-dimensionally written they’re practically nonexistent.

At the same time, as lame as much of the movie is truth be told it’s actually aged rather decently, and as silly and as forgettable as the central narrative itself is thanks to the enduring chemistry of its stars there are still plenty of moments that made me chuckle. Hiller, Wilder and Pryor never play Wally and Dave’s handicaps as something to pity nor do they make fun of their respective ailments. Instead, they shine the spotlight on society at large, the majority of the venom verbally unleashed against the people they interact with and, even more importantly, at one another.

Yet there are long dry spells here that seem to go on forever, and the amount of slapstick (unlike Stir Crazy and Silver Streak which were both more improvisational dialogue driven) is a little overwhelming after a while. Also, large portions of the film seem to spent with the two yelling uncontrollably at one another, and I couldn’t help but wish while watching the pair would turn down the volume a little allowing their characterizations to contain a bit more nuance.

Still, See No Evil, Hear No Evil isn’t close to the disaster the majority of its 1989 reviews would lead you to believe. There are moments of comic inspiration that rival just about anything put to screen in recent memory, an extended bit with a police photographer echoes Abbot and Costello in both conception and in execution. The movie isn’t a success, that’s a fact, but it does have its merits, and for fans of the stars minor effort or no it’s still a motion picture worth checking out.

THE VIDEO

See No Evil, Hear No Evil is presented on a single-layer 25GB Blu-ray MPEG-4 AVC Video with a 1080p 1.85:1 transfer.

THE AUDIO

See No Evil, Hear No Evil comes to Blu-ray in English LPCM 2.0 and includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

THE EXTRAS

There are no extras included with this release.

FINAL THOUGHTS

See No Evil, Hear No Evil gets by as well as it does thanks to the glorious chemistry between its two stars. Sadly, the script is flat and unwieldy, never going anyplace all that interesting. Fans of Pryor and Wilder will certainly want to give it a look, but as high a technical quality the Blu-ray from Image Entertainment is or how cheap the price on Amazon and at other outlets may be I can’t in good conscious suggest anyone pick it up unless it is as a rental.