Bullseye!

Sometimes, you watch a movie and you just know that they had a blast making it. There is an energy there, behind the performances, that somehow can’t be faked. Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake is a classic example of the kind of picture I’m talking about. So, to, is Bullseye. Unfortunately, unlike Ocean’s Eleven, I don’t think the end product of Bullseye is very good.

Bullseye is a big, stupid romp where Michael Caine and Roger Moore both play double roles. One pairing has them as two parts of a four person confidence team that are looking for their next score. On the other, a team that has developed a new form of near-limitless energy generation which they have decided to clandestinely sell to the highest bidder in a most unpatriotic manner. Since Moore and Caine look like Moore and Caine, the con-men decide to impersonate them to steal the contents of their safety deposit boxes only to find themselves embroiled in a dangerous web of international intrigue and espionage.

This, naturally, leads to many mistaken identity hi-jinx and other wacky situations. There is a zany, madcap nature to the whole thing and a kind of self aware winking to the camera attitude that ought to be really fun. Sadly, however, it just isn’t. It is so clear that Moore and Caine are having such a good time clowning around but the actual jokes and situations for comedy don’t land. There is a bit where a radio communicator in an earpiece gets its signal crossed with a local news radio station and the field agent is so thick they start parroting lines from the radio without thinking. This is a bit that is done enough that its presence here is already feeling cliche, but somehow the version in this film is also joyless and unfunny on top of being cliched and hacky.

The mistaken identity gags, which are as old as Shakespeare if not older, somehow also never create a situation that got much of a giggle out of me. I’m usually a soft touch when it comes to the absurd situation allowed by such shenanigans, to the point where seeing the same setup and pay off in the same Shakespearean comedy will have me laugh every time, and yet as I think back on the film I struggle to remember a single noteworthy, let alone done right funny, use of the identical appearance setup.

In the end, the movie begins to feel constructed out of a desire by Moore and Caine to have the comedic challenge of playing multiple parts in the same movie, a la Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall in Coming to America. Beyond that, there is a bare bones plot and some half-assed gags, some meta humor around the casting of Moore’s actual daughter as a secondary character, and not much else. Normally I write something here about how I can see that there is a much better movie that they were aiming at, but didn’t quite get there, but I’m not actually sure that is the case here. It feels like they got exactly what they were aiming for, it just isn’t that good. At least it looks like everybody involved had an absolute blast making the thing, so maybe it wasn’t a complete waste.

Would Recommend: If you want to see two famous British actors joyously smirking through joyless material.

Would Not Recommend: If you feel the last thing Moore era Bond movies needed was to be more camp and more comedically oriented.