Review: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Tone Deaf And Without Vision.
- Apr 24, 2017
- 2 min read
A good gimmick can make or break a movie, regardless of genre. And doing as much as you can with that gimmick without letting it get old can create a timeless film. But when that gimmick is poorly executed or continually repeated it can kill an otherwise good idea.
Wally (Richard Pryor) and Dave (Gene Wilder) are blind and deaf respectively. When they each witness half of a murder, Dave, the visuals and Wally, the sound, they are unable to convince the police that they are not the killers. After they escape the law they set out to prove their innocence, regardless of what they do, or don't, see or hear.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil should be far funnier than it is and, while it is funny, it suffers from considerable repetition of the same jokes, usually over and over in the same scene. There's a running gag about a police chief who can't comprehend how he's been outwitted by two disabled individuals which, while it's probably the funniest part of the movie, ends with him repeating how much he wants to shoot them, at least eight times. The first time was funny, the second, less so, by the time he reached the fifth a ten second long piece of footage felt like it was taking forever.
That pretty much sums up the whole movie. What would make a genuinely funny short film, maybe an hour at most, is dragged into an almost two hour long borefest. Gene Wilder is expectedly good and outacts everyone else, especially his co-star, Richard Pryor, whose acting ability seems to be limited to gazing into the distance and shouting everything he says.
When it's funny, it's funny, but only the first time. The writing, characters and many of the jokes are pretty average. What could have been a much tighter, much better, comedic experience is instead a film with a great concept but poor execution. It has its moments but they aren't worth sitting through the whole thing. See no movie, hear no movie
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