After their collaborations on 'Stir Crazy' and 'Silver Streak', Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder are reunited for this blind (Pryor) and deaf (Wilder) double-act.
There is a perfunctory 'murder mix-up' plot (in which Anthony Zerbe, fresh from his portrayal of a Bond baddie in 'Licence To Kill', makes a suitably dastardly villain), but it invariably takes second place to the jokes.
These have a very familiar ring to them. Pryor goes through the old Stevie Wonder chestnut of being scandalised that he is black - 'What will the guys at the club say?'. A fellow blind man asks him for help to cross the road and Pryor leads him into a removal van. And there is the inevitable car chase with the blind man behind the wheel overturning vegetable stalls and scattering pedestrians as he goes.
The film is not without its funny moments - like when Pryor has to pose as a Swedish doctor and answer questions on multiple orgasm in geriatric women at a medical conference. But the deaf/blind confusions test the patience, and you yearn for the spark that fired Pryor in concert or Wilder in 'The Producers' or 'Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex'.
The pivotal gag revolves around Pryor dumping an ice cream cone on Wilder's head, which gives an idea of the level of humour. The credits for 'See No Evil, Hear No Evil' show that there were five scriptwriters (including Wilder himself). What on earth were they all doing?
