Best Defense

A muezzin wakes the tank driver in Kuwait, calling him to praise Allah with a belly dancer. A disc jockey wakes the tank designer in California, permanently behind the 8-ball.

There you have the DYP and the WAM, problem of a gyroscope. The deus ex machina anticipates Lumet’s Gloria.

“It’s such a relief to meet someone with a real mind!” The satire is on the order of Michael Ritchie’s Smile, and bears comparison with William Friedkin’s Deal of the Century. David Rasche’s Valleyite KGB captain looks like an ingredient of Kevin Kline’s American agent in Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda.

Tahiti and Khartoum can wait, one reluctantly agrees to stick it out in Seal Beach for the sake of the Western World. “Hey, how’d you like to deep-throat my .38, cocksucker?” With Dudley Moore, the source of the characterization is revealed as Sterling Hayden’s Gen. Ripper in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, to be sure. “Boum! Dead, comunista.”

The crux of the problem. “If you put a real DYP in a real tank, that tank could be blown off the face of the earth.”

Iraq invades Kuwait (the local tank sergeants are wild and crazy guys). Question of “heat exchange”, solved by toy design, “the playing fields of Eton.”

Vincent Canby of the New York Times, “mind-bendingly bad”. Time Out, “a dismally unfunny shambles”. TV Guide, “a dud.” Eleanor Mannikka (Rovi), “flat comedy... hampered by intercutting”.

A key point in the construction has reference to Kotcheff’s Fun with Dick and Jane.