(DVD Confess)
I’ll have to admit, the two 1980s Fletch movies starring Chevy Chase and I.M. Fletcher are among my “guilty pleasure” movie favorites. Chase is so over-the-top “wacky” as con man/investigative journalist Fletch in those two films that his comical performance kind of overwhelms the stories in Fletch (1985) and Fletch Lives (1989).
This new 2022 film, both starring
and produced by Jon (Mad Men) Hamm, takes Gregory McDonald’s second Fletch
novel, Confess Fletch (1976), and updates it to our modern era, but manages to
keep much of the style and tone intact. Hamm is far more subtle than Chase was
at bringing Fletch to life, but that works in his favor. He doesn’t need
outrageous costumes or larger-than-life fake personalities to ingratiate Fletch
with the characters he’s interacting with — his Fletch is simply slick and fast
on the uptake. In this film, Fletch returns from Europe to find a dead woman in
the luxury loft apartment he’s been leant by a friend. Fletch quickly becomes
the #1 suspect in the eyes of the pair of homicide detectives investigating the
case, and his efforts to locate a stolen art collection are hampered by his
needs to come up with ways to shake his police tail.
Hamm is absolutely terrific in
this, but he’s not the only one. Kyle MacLachlan is fun as a germophobic bad
guy, Roy Wood Jr. and Ayden Mayeri as detectives “Slo Mo” Monroe and Griz
provide a lot of comic relief, Lorenza Izzo as Fletch’s new Italian girlfriend,
who sets the case in motion, is a firebrand, and Marcia Gay Harden (currently
killing it on the CBS drama So Help Me Todd) is amusing as the Countess de
Grassi.
If you’re at all a fan of the
original Fletch novels by McDonald, you should appreciate this new film. Here’s
hoping it was successful enough to inspire another!
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try the two earlier Fletch movies, starring Chevy Chase Fletch
and Fletch Lives, or any of the eleven Fletch novels by Gregory McDonald, published between 1974
and 1994 — the earliest are the best.)
( Internet Movie
Database entry for this film )
Recommended
by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service
Have you watched this one?
What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff
Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that
page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog
individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the
reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
No comments:
Post a Comment