Review of Fletch (1985) by Jesse O — 10 Aug 2015

Chevy Chase has always been good at playing these sort of smug, arrogant assholes probably, well, because he is one from what you hear from the people he's worked with and all the stories that have come out of how much of an asshole he is.

But, and this is removing the man himself from his craft, if you will, Chevy Chase can be a genuinely funny man if his heart is truly into something. Of course he did go through a pretty terrible run of films in the 90s, not to mention his disastrous talk show, but I think this was at a point where Chevy was either bitter or had stopped caring enough to actually make an effort in the films he appeared in post-80s.

But, again, I genuinely think that Chevy Chase was a funny man, I just think he had great comedic timing and delivery. While I wouldn't ever say that Chevy Chase ever reached the heights of what his career could've been as compared to someone like, say, Bill Murray, though Bill had his own struggles in the 90s before having his career resurrected by Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola, I think that Chevy can be a funny man when he's inspired.

This film definitely proves it. With that said this movie, at best, is pretty good. Perhaps it's the fact that it hasn't aged well, this movie is 30 years old by this point, but there were certainly parts of the film that really missed the mark for me.

Like the whole airport hangar scene, this is probably the most unfunny scene in the entire film, it's like none of the jokes worked. And it's not like it's a one-minute scene and you move on, it was pretty long and the longer it went the less funny it got.

So that was the one scene that I'd have probably cut out, or made shorter, if it was up to me. It just didn't work very well, for the most part. And that's also the thing about the film, it just keeps getting less and less funny as it goes along.

It starts out fast and, somehow, as the film progresses and you uncover more of the mystery, it starts to become less and less interesting. I just wasn't that invested into the Fletch's investigation anyway, it was just poorly handled to me.

They just did not a good job at exposition, in my opinion. It was all over the place and you didn't really get a feel for the story past just giving Chevy an outlet for his sarcasm and costume usage.

That's all it pretty much boils down to. The story is secondary. Honestly, this film is barely good to be honest. It actually started off very well and, as mentioned, the film's quality kept descending the longer it went.

It's not like it jumped off a cliff, it took slow and small steps towards that cliff, but it never actually jumped off of it. It was cut off at a point where I, overall, would have to say the film is good, but it's not enthusiastic at all.

Chevy Chase is good and he carries this film, but it's one that gets slightly worse the more it goes on and I can't really ignore that fact. I'd recommend it if you have Netflix, or it came on TV, but there's better Chevy Chase movies out there from the 80s.

This isn't close to being the best.