Jack Lemmon does some funny overplaying as a suicidal man in a Southern California hotel who makes friends with his neighbor, a grouchy hitman on the verge of retiring after one last job. Unfortunately, this US remake of the 1973 French-Italian black comedy "L'emmerdeu" is a botch. Lemmon is reteamed with Walter Matthau and their "Fortune Cookie"/"Front Page" director Billy Wilder, yet the results are strenuous right from the start. Wilder's witless script (penned with writing pal I. A. L. Diamond) is a wet noodle; there's no snap, just caustic flapping and nagging. "Buddy Buddy" is also one of worst-looking major studio films of the 1980s, with lemon meringue color and cheap process shots. Matthau, constantly opening-closing-and-reopening his suitcase, looks terrible throughout; with his hair dyed shoe-polish black and the color of his skin a sickly white pallor, he resembles a waxworks figure. Jack sticks to his proven formula--those nervous/neurotic Lemmon-isms--and survives the morass, but everyone else has been prodded to play these gross jokes to the hilt. * from ****