See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) TriStar/Action-Comedy RT: 102 minutes Rated R (language, violence, brief nudity, sexual references, alcohol use) Director: Arthur Hiller Screenplay: Earl Barret, Marvin Worth, Eliot Wald, Andrew Kurtzman and Gene Wilder Music: Stewart Copeland Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper Release date: May 12, 1989 (US) Cast: Richard Pryor, Gene Wilder, Joan Severance, Kevin Spacey, Alan North, Louis Giambalvo, Anthony Zerbe, Kristen Childs, Audrie Neenan, Lauren Tom, John Capodice. Box Office: $46.9M (US)
Rating: ***
In their previous outings together- i.e. Silver Streak and Stir Crazy- Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder played ordinary guys who unwittingly find themselves caught in the middle of a messy situation and falsely accused of a crime. In See No Evil, Hear No Evil, they play a couple of ordinary guys who unwittingly find themselves caught in the middle messy situation and falsely accused of a crime. So what’s different this time? One of them is blind and the other is deaf. That puts a slightly different spin on the same story.
The deaf guy Dave Lyons (Wilder) runs a small concession shop in a New York City building. One day, the blind guy Wally Karew (Pryor) shows up to apply for a job. After an initial misunderstanding, Dave hires Wally and they become friends.
One morning, a nervous man (Capodice, Q) shows up at the shop and asks Dave to read him the ingredients on a box of antacid pills. While Dave’s back is turned, the man removes a gold coin from a secret drawer in his briefcase and drops it into a cigar box full of coins sitting on the counter. A beautiful woman (Severance, No Holds Barred) approaches the man and shoots him in the stomach. Dave turns around just in time to see the woman’s legs as she walks away. Wally hears the shot and comes running, but he trips over the dead man’s body. The police arrive just in time to see the two men next to the man’s body with Wally holding the gun. They’re taken in for questioning and they antagonize Captain Braddock (North, Highlander) so badly that he charges them both with the murder.
Afraid that the guys saw and heard too much, the real killer Eve and her accomplice Kirgo (Spacey, The Usual Suspects) show up at the police station posing as attorneys and make arrangements for their release. Dave recognizes the woman’s legs and Wally recognizes her perfume. Sensing their imminent doom, they escape from police custody and run for their lives. They set out to prove their innocence while trying to avoid both the police and the killers.
I have to say that I like the idea of putting a blind man and deaf man in a situation where they must solve a crime to prove their innocence. Each one has particular strengths that will both help and hinder their efforts. For example, Dave is able to read Eve’s lips as she speaks on the phone to her boss Mr. Sutherland (Zerbe, The Dead Zone). At the same time, he’s unable to hear somebody coming up behind him.
While See No Evil, Hear No Evil contains its fair share of cheap laughs, it cannot be described as mean-spirited because director Arthur Hiller (The In-Laws, Outrageous Fortune) wisely chooses not to exploit the guys’ disabilities. Instead, the comedy rises out of certain situations like when Wally tries to help another blind man cross a busy New York City street. Ever the con man, Wally tries to trick people into believing that he can see like when he’s sitting on a subway pretending to read a newspaper but holding it upside down. It’s funny because only somebody with Pryor’s natural jive-ass attitude could pull this scene off.
Pryor and Wilder make a great comedy team. See No Evil, Hear No Evil works primarily because of their amazing chemistry as well as their individual talents. As I said, Pryor has this natural jive-ass attitude and when he brings this persona to his characters, it’s usually going to result in a funny movie. On the other hand, Wilder’s screen persona consists of a combination of natural serenity and the tendency to suddenly go all frantic and berserk. Pryor and Wilder make See No Evil, Hear No Evil better than it should have been because when you remove them from the equation, what’s left is a fairly standard action comedy. Everybody’s after that coin. It’s obvious that its purpose is something other than monetary, but it’s really just a screenwriting device, a catalyst for the messy situation and the subsequent scenes of action and comedy.
There’s a pretty good car chase as Dave and Wally work together to evade their pursuers while wreaking havoc on the streets of New York. Again, it’s standard stuff; we’ve seen it all before. It doesn’t matter because Hiller has the talent to make it work. See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a pretty silly movie, but it’s also quite funny and that’s what counts the most. It made me laugh a number of times. That’s enough to make me it . While it may not be as hilarious as Stir Crazy, it’s certainly far better than Another You, the final screen pairing of Pryor and Wilder. It’s nice to watch a movie like See No Evil, Hear No Evil and remember the great comedy talents of the late Wilder and Pryor. I can’t speak any evil about this one.